Ep. 76- The Janowska camp with Waitman Wade Beorn and special guest host Doris Bergen

The Janowska concentration camp may well be the most important Holocaust place most people have never heard of.  It was central to the Holocaust in eastern Poland, was the scene of unspeakable cruelty, but also witnessed a successful armed uprising.

In this episode hosted by the amazing Holocaust historian Doris Bergen, we talk about my work on the camp and what a study of Janowska tells us about the Holocaust.

Waitman Wade Beorn is an associate professor of history at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. He is also (most of the time) the host of the Holocaust History Podcast which you are now listening to.

Beorn, Waitman Wade. Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (2024)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.91)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. And today I have a bit of a surprise, which is that you're going to be hearing more of me talk, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it's because, my good friend and the amazing Holocaust historian herself, Doris Bergen, the chancellor Rose and Ray Wolf chair emerita in Holocaust studies, from the University of Toronto, very kindly offered to

do kind of reverse podcast interviewing me about my most recent book called Between the Wires, the Inoskhe Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv. And I'm super tickled that she was willing to do this. And I guess this is kind of like the chair at a conference taking their prerogative to ask the first question. But I guess I can I can devote one episode perhaps to this, but it's really cool that Doris volunteered to to read my book and to

lead a discussion about it. I'm really grateful for her. So Doris, thank you so much. And I am now turning over the reins of the Holocaust Review Podcast to you.

Doris Bergen (01:08.777)
Excellent. Thank you so much, Waichman, and it's really a pleasure to be here. And I'm super excited to discuss your amazing book, Between the Wires, the Yanovska Camp, and the Holocaust in Lviv. And I suggested doing this discussion with you because I appreciated so much the conversation of my book and many of the conversations that I've heard between you and other authors. And I thought,

your book deserves that same kind of, you know, concerted informed attention. So I don't know, I hope I can do justice to the high standard that you set as an interviewer. But I just want to start by telling all our listeners that Between the Wires is a history of one Holocaust site, the Janowska camp in Lviv. And it's a really unusual book.

because it approaches this site from so many different angles with a focus on place and geography, with a focus on the perpetrators, with a lot of attention to survivors and also victims, to resistance in the camp, to post-war justice, to the legacies of the camp. So it's a really tremendous book, but it's also a really tough book to read.

I work in this field, I'm reading very, very painful and gruesome materials all the time. And I can tell you, Waitman, you didn't hold back. And there's a particular way that you treated the material that is very respectful, but it's also, you can't hide, you can't hide from it. So I wanted to start by asking you to tell us a bit about the backstory. You hint at it.

the preface, but how did you come to write this particular book and this kind of book about Janowska?

Waitman Beorn (03:15.406)
it's a great question. mean, there's really, there's two, there's two answers to this. And one is, and this goes out for all grad students out there and early career scholars, I guess, cause now I'm a, I guess I'm a mid career person by this point. but it's, it's a, it's a warning to keep all of your stuff from when you're doing research. because when I was doing my first book, which was on the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus, my

The way that I went about trying to find the cases that ultimately became the case studies for that course or that book rather was I went to the archives and I started looking up wherever Wehrmacht had been involved in Holocaust stuff. And these were mainly things that came up in post-war investigations of some kind. And one of them happened to be this German army motor pool unit, the Harris-Kraftsfahrtseug Park 547, which was in Lviv in Ukraine.

And, there were allegations that they had used concentration camp labor. And that didn't that had no point for my book that I was writing at the time, because I was looking at Fairmont participation in shootings in the East. And so it sort of was there in my notes. And I wrote the first book or the second book, which was a different sort of a more of a survey text of Holocaust use in Europe. And then, you know, as I think a lot of us do, we're.

thinking about what's our next project going to be? And it's often difficult to kind of pull that out of thin air. What do we want to do? What intervention do we want to make in the scholarship? What needs to be written? And my first thought was, I'm going to go back and look at this German Army motor pool unit. And maybe I'll write something about another way in which the Wehrmacht was participating in the Holocaust. Maybe it'll be a journal article or something.

But then I realized there was this Unovska connection, this place called Unovska, which to my shame, suppose, I'd never heard of it. It was new to me. And I started looking into it a little bit. And I realized that the Motorpool Unit article book would have been OK, but the story is Unovska.

Waitman Beorn (05:34.242)
What's really ironic about that is, I don't claim any particular brilliance in having chosen to write about it, but there wasn't a monograph. Any detailed study of the camp, mean, people like Dieter Pohl and Thomas Sankuler have written chapters of it in discussions of larger topics. And so it's not unknown, but it hadn't ever really had a book written about it. Which again, it's ironic because as we'll probably talk a little bit about, know, like,

It's not unknown. you know, there Leon Wells is we'll talk about him, you know, but he wrote a memoir that was, you know, as far as Holocaust memoirs go, fairly popular and people know about it. He testified at Eichmann, you know, Wiesenthal was in the camp. You know, it had been that the UNOFSC had been part of a the second largest Nazi trial in German history, postwar history. You know, so this is not a

It's as we never should say this, but I certainly didn't discover, you know, like buried in some archives someplace. I mean, it was out there. It just had never been and never really been written about. And so that's kind of how I came to the topic. And then as far as the book, and we'll talk about this probably some more, but I wanted to include my real admiration and love for understanding space in place and geographical or spatial approaches.

to the Holocaust that I, you know, I'm so thankful for people like Paul Jaskot and Tim Cole and Ann Knowles and Alberto Giordano and all these, Simone Gigliotti, all these people that I'd worked with on the Holocaust Geographies project and that really opened my eyes in a new way of thinking about and therefore writing about the Holocaust. So on the one hand, I wanted to adopt a real spatially sort of informed approach. And secondly, I,

You know, I think the, the, aspiration that, I have, and the many of us have, you know, is to live up to Shaw Friedlander's, you know, exhortation to write an integrated history of the Holocaust, something that is not a perpetrator history, that is not solely focused on one side or the other, but to really encompass all, all the people that are involved, all the stories simultaneously to really give us a kind of organic, holistic understanding of the, of the event. And so I was

Waitman Beorn (07:57.74)
I was trying to do that in this book as well. combining the two to sort of also be able to show using this one place. Really, mean, what's in a certain way, Yanovski is kind of a forest gump for the Holocaust in the sense that it allows you to talk about almost every major topical theme that we all think about or deal with in the Holocaust. And so was trying to kind of

do all of those things at once. In really my first monograph that was, first book really that was my own completely. There was no, it wasn't an dissertation. It was something that I could control the narrative and how I wrote it myself. And so I was trying to do that.

Doris Bergen (08:44.32)
Yeah, yeah. No, I really see that integrated history impulse coming through. Can we go back to something you said is so interesting when you said, look, we can't use the word discovered. I didn't discover Yanovska. It's not unknown, but this combination of a place that is both, like you say, ubiquitous. It's like every process, you know, the labor, the mass killing, the sorting out of people with disabilities, the

intersections of Jews and non-Jewish victims. It's all right there. And yet, as you say, a place that kind of is off to the side in terms of where scholarship has focused, you know? And I think a lot of times people assume, there's been so much work on the Holocaust. We already know everything. But then you come across a topic exactly like Yanovska where you're like, well,

We don't already know everything, we don't even know that much. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about why it is that this particular site, more Jews were murdered there than in Madanak, you tell us, Crucial to the destruction of the vast and important Jewish community of Galicia, you know? Yet kind of, yeah, barely mentioned, a footnote, maybe a chapter, even in quite specialized works.

Why is it? And then a sub question to that. Does your title, Between the Wires, I don't know, somehow capture something of this both like important yet somehow obscured nature of Janowska camp?

Waitman Beorn (10:29.166)
Yeah, I mean, I think those are great questions. I'll do the second part first because it's a little bit a little bit more simpler. The Between the Wires piece really was I was just referring to this particular point in the camp called the Between Wire, which is where these people were sort of sent before they were were taken off to be killed. Though I think your point is actually great that it works that way, too, of sort of this idea of something sort of slip in some ways through the cracks.

And I think, you know, going, thinking about why, why not, know, Oscar, right? Why hasn't it been written? And I think that there are sort of a number of sort of macro and micro explanations for this. I mean, the macro of course, is that for a very long time, anything sort of East in Eastern Europe, what, with the exception of Auschwitz, you know, was, was off the radar to a certain extent, um, due to political reasons, cold war interest, um, limitations of archival access, limitations of physical access.

I think also the, and again, this is a macro sort of generalization, but I think a lot of Holocaust memory and recognition in the West, it certainly is tempered by the German camps because that's where they were. That's what was liberated by the Western allies. Many of the stories and the survivors who end up in the United States and Canada and Britain and elsewhere.

had also had experiences in German camps or that had been their last camp experience, even if they'd had experiences elsewhere. so that sort of dominated the sort of memory landscape in a certain sense, what people were interested in hearing about. I think there's a physical issue, right, which is that Yinovska today is still a prison. know, the terrain, the physical space is off limits. Most of whatever was left outside of the footprint of the modern

prison, is identical to the footprint of the previous prison of the conservation camp, is gone. In Lviv, you have a very, very, very small Jewish population. So there really aren't people there to care for the memory. Most Ukrainians, it's not... I don't want to cast necessarily aspersions, but that's not their memory. That's not their place. That's not their suffering in the same way that it would be for...

Waitman Beorn (12:53.556)
Jewish population. So, you know, there's there wasn't the interest there. And the more that I think about it, one of the great things about this question is also and something we can talk about, perhaps, is that there's almost no Nazi documentation about UNOPSCA. So in a weird way, you know, the book is written mainly off of, you know, survivor testimonies, as well as

trial records and German interrogations after the fact. then around the edges, there's Nazi documentation in Lviv. But because Yanovska was not officially a concentration camp until like January of 1944, I think it doesn't generate the documentation that other places do. And that documentation doesn't then end up being copied back in places that survive like Berlin or elsewhere. Because the camp itself, it's...

It's this kind of amateur hour affair. And I suspect that before they evacuated, they really were able to burn most of the stuff that was on site and take off. So I think all of those things together meant that UNOVSKA kind of, and it ended up pushed to the side a little bit. even those people that did great work on it. So Dieter and Thomas Sankular and others.

writing mainly in German, you know, that that wasn't their focus primary. No one sort of said, I want to I want to write about this one particular place. And I think, you know, maybe that that's part of the part of the difference as well. And also the fact that in more recent years, there has been a focus of, I think, in a certain sense, coming back to writing books about about camp specifically and sort of saying, let's I'm thinking about Jacob Flaws's book and Chad Gibbs forthcoming book on Tripolinka, know, Tripolinka, who would have thought that we really need a good

Doris Bergen (14:41.409)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (14:50.606)
a couple new good monographs on Treblinka, but we do. People haven't really looked at these camps again after the first time. So I think all of those things together might've sort led to why it wasn't sort of on the front shelf of historians.

Doris Bergen (15:06.452)
Now you tossed off almost offhandedly the fact that the site is a prison right now. And I have to say when I saw that in the book and I saw the picture of that prison, it really knocked me for a loop. You know what I mean? Like thinking about what that means, just like you said about just the physical access to the space. And you mentioned at the beginning that for you focusing on space, geography, on place,

That was really central to how you approach this topic. And I wonder if you could say more about that. Like, I just want to give you an example of some of the things that to me seemed really unusual about Janowska as a place, even though it's also in some way quite, like you say, typical and even almost emblematic of many different kinds of camps. I mean, one thing you mentioned is it's an urban camp. It's a camp

in a city, not outside a city, not on the outskirts, in a city. And the significance of that to me really came across when you described one Jewish prisoner, I forget his name, who escapes by jumping onto a passing tram car. Like, am I getting that wrong? Like, that kind of proximity to the center of an urban population that literally

a could escape by jumping on a tram that is passing by like that really hit me as something quite distinctive. And at the same time, you talk a lot about the sandhills, the ravines that are used as mass killing sites right beside the camp. So there's that whole aspect, the prison that continues, the importance of your own physical presence, being able not maybe to access everything, but to actually go

to walk on certain paths to look, then the disruption of the space by the war. And finally, you use at one point the term spatial truth. So that's a lot to unpack, guess, but it gets at the core of your methodology. And I wonder, can you talk about what is distinctive about that space and how that shapes your analysis?

Waitman Beorn (17:31.968)
Yeah, I mean, gosh, those are lots of really great questions. And I think first and foremost, you know, and I would say this to any historian really, if it's at all possible, you have to visit the places that you're talking about. Even if there's not so much there, I mean, there is there's something and this is going to sound sort of, you know, hokey, but there is something intangible to having walked the ground and sort of getting a sense of where you are and what you're

what you're looking at and, and, know, where's North and orienting yourself, you know, having, you know, worked on a project related to this camp that deals a lot with, with space and, and photographs and just having been able to sort of say, okay, I kind of know where I am and what I'm looking at. You know, it's really important. And, and if you, if you look at the, if you actually draw the boundaries of the Inowsk camp, the Svangzorbytslager side, not the, not the DAW side, but the Svangzorbytslager side.

And you go look at the Google map of the footprint. It's identical. mean, and it's because this is no mystery. mean, the Soviets arrived in 44 and they needed a prison camp to put the people they wanted to put in prison camps. So here it is. And they put them in there. And then when Ukraine became a Soviet Republic, they used it. now Ukraine needed a prison. And so now it's still penal calling number 30.

In an incredible irony, it makes furniture, which is some of the stuff that the, the DAW made back in 1941. but in terms of what's interesting or unique about it, I think you touched on it already. One is the fact that, you know, it isn't, it's an, like it's 20 minutes walk from downtown even today. Right. So it, and, and, and during the time of the war, it was, literally on the last streetcar stop and it's still a streetcar stop today.

In fact, one of the things, one of the great things that the L'Evive Center for European history was trying to do, East European history was trying to do, was to actually create an exhibit at that last tram stop about UNOSCA. So anyway, it's an urban, mean, it's not Treblinka, it's not out in the middle of nowhere. And as I said, it's a double edged sword. And for one of the reasons that you noted is of course that most of the prisoners there

Waitman Beorn (19:58.782)
essentially are locals. know, they're basically imprisoned in their own backyard, though as time goes on and trains come in from elsewhere in Galicia and there's that transfer personnel, the population becomes a bit more diverse. But so people are local. this is a double edged sword, because on the one hand, they may know each other. They may know people on the outside. They may know people in the ghetto. They know the terrain because they live there.

Doris Bergen (20:26.934)
with

Waitman Beorn (20:29.102)
On the other hand, Nazis know this too. And so it in some ways helps to doubly imprison the prisoners. know, there are examples. There's one example that I think I remember in the writing in the book where, you know, a guy, you know, literally escapes and the Nazis sort of say, if you don't come back, we're going to kill your mom. You know, I mean, and this message gets out and he, you know.

He eventually decides not to. But I mean, this was something that the Nazis could do. They could go to the ghetto while the ghetto still existed and get your family and that kind of thing. So it's a double edged sword. I tried to do a lot of stuff with it, but I think there's probably still work to be done about the import of having a camp population of people that are all local. Because actually, the more I think about it, that's not really a common

a common phenomenon in a lot of these places. mean, the ghettos, yes, but not in places of internment, even in the German camps. These are not people that are sort of from that area. So I think that's very significant in understanding sort of how this works. And one of the things I tried to do was to show these connections, right? That this isn't just sort of a dot on a map that is separate from everything else. That actually it's...

It's committed connected to the Lviv ghetto. It's connected to the Lviv set city in general, but it's also connected again, working at different scales. It's connected to the region and in many ways connected to the overall Nazi genocidal project in Europe itself. You know, and so I think that's, that's one of the elements of sort of, guess, going back to another part of your question, trying to, I kind of cringe when you said that I wrote spatial truth, cause maybe

Maybe I should say, that sounds very grandiose because we know we're historians. so there's no such thing as there's no such thing as truth. But I think, you know, what I was trying to do with a spatial approach is some of the things that I've already suggested, know, proximity, scale, interconnectedness or the lack thereof. are all sort of characteristics. But I wanted to try to present them in a kind of concrete way and think about, how

Doris Bergen (22:22.794)
That's a good phrase!

Waitman Beorn (22:48.056)
How are these things actually, what do they look like in this particular instance? And then, to follow on the more difficult question, which is, okay, these relationships exist, now what do they mean? Which is the harder piece. Okay, so these things are connected, but if we're marking an undergraduate's paper and they say, these two things are connected, then obviously in the margins we're gonna say, what does it mean? Well, that applies to us too, right?

Doris Bergen (23:14.561)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (23:15.749)
I was trying to sort of answer some of those questions as well.

Doris Bergen (23:19.102)
And can you say a bit more about the sand hills and ravines? Because that also struck me that in addition to the prisoners in the camp being local, many of the people who were murdered right there were also local, though not all. And again,

What does that mean beyond sort of the shock and the horror of thinking, now you have ground that is literally, I think one of the investigations said, like, deeply saturated with blood, like that sense of the proximity of the killing as well. Like you didn't have a sense of while Jews are being taken to some distant place. It's like, no, it's right there in those hills.

Waitman Beorn (24:02.754)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, and and, you know, while the vast majority of the victims are Jews, there are other folks that are shot there as well. So first of all, for the listeners, you know, these are these are essentially mass shooting pits, you know, directly behind the camp. There are these series of ravines, cuts, draws, you know, somewhat mountainous, not mountainous, but hilly hilly terrain. And it's generally sandy, which makes it easy to excavate. And so you would have

you know, essentially working pits that would then be open and closed. New ones be dug as more people need to be needed to be killed. And the killing actually starts before the camp. There's some minds outscrooping killings that take place in these ravines behind the camp. So, you know, they very quickly become known. I mean, it's one of those things in the ghetto. know, Jews in the ghetto would say, you know, it's kind of the parents threatening their children. You if you don't.

behave, you'll end up in the sands kind of thing. these are these are things that were said because it was understood that the sands were synonymous with with death. And we're talking, you know, as many as 80,000 people being shot in there again, vast majority Jews, but also handicapped people from again, these are all local, right? So these are from the local, you know, mental hospital or

Asylum are taken out there and shot. so if prisoners of war are shot, you know, one of these enthuses of, know, people convicted of various offenses, are, killed there as well. So you have, again, the sort of a microcosm of the Nazi genocidal project taking place in these, in these sands and this one other site in the Leechikoff forest, which will become important later as well, which is about a mile or so away. So it's also, it's, it's in a park kind of essentially a wooded area now.

And so again, these are these are very, you know, the shots are audible, I'm sure. You know, the greatest example of this is is as the bodies are being destroyed later on, the fire department shows up at UNOSCA because it thinks that there's a massive fire taking place. These are actually the fires of the bodies being burned. So again, and the assessor basically like go away. We got this. You know, don't don't worry about it.

Waitman Beorn (26:25.208)
So I mean, these things are very sort of publicly understood by everybody. And then even today, I mean, again, what's to think about the site again in the modern context, the Leechikov Forest is untouched. mean, it's I went there with one of my great partners from the L'Evive Center. And we think we probably found where the site of the Sonderkommando was, but it's not marked really. There's one marker in the woods, undisturbed because it's

parkland and the same thing with the with the hills behind the Inoske. So on the one hand, it's not it's not commemorated as such and you can walk your dog there and you can do whatever you want. And a variety of different things were used in those areas after the war. There was a police training dog facility. There's a pig farm, various. There's like I think there's there's still like a mechanic shop back in there. But a lot of it is just is untouched because it's municipal land. And so it's not.

privately owned. So what's nice about it is that the possibility exists for both the circle inquiry and identifying where these these grades might have been and marking them. They haven't been sort of taken up by by urban sprawl or whatnot. So, you know, again, double edged sword that they're not commemorated, but at least they're not at least haven't sort of gotten the Babi are treatment, I suppose.

Doris Bergen (27:24.907)
Yes.

Doris Bergen (27:40.224)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Doris Bergen (27:50.241)
Yeah. You know, one of the things that you mentioned upfront that is really a distinguishing feature of your book is the use of survivor accounts, survivor testimonies. And, you know, I think I've mentioned to you privately that for me, I first heard of this Yanovska camp actually many years ago, but it was only because of the memoir of Leon Wells Yanovska wrote. So

I didn't really think about the place, if you know what I mean. I thought about him and his experience in that book. And I was interested to learn that Wiesenthal had also been there. And you also mentioned in your acknowledgments that you met several survivors and that a number of family members were quite crucial in providing materials and answers and so on.

And I think it really does shape the nature of the book, that kind of openness and the use of survivor sources, not only as illustrations, but as core sources of your historical evidence and knowledge. And I'm wondering if you could say more about your relationship, maybe with those family members, how that got started, how that maybe changed your plan for the book as you went.

In other words, how you integrated history in the way that you talked about it, sort of in terms of working with actual people.

Waitman Beorn (29:18.83)
Yeah, I mean, again, think we all probably say this, but, I wish I'd been born 20 years, 30 years earlier, because there would have a lot more people for me to talk to. Right. So I, you know, I'm, I'm very much sort of limited, of course, by just the passage of time. Um, I will say with Leon, uh, Leon Wells is amazing and he's like one of my favorites, favorite survivors, cause he's just, he's just an amazing human being. And the way he tells a story is really fascinating, but for anybody, anybody out there,

who a grad student or whatever who wants a project or a journal article, there's a great one for you. And it's Leon Walz's testimony over time because the man gave testimony to the Soviets in 1944. He did Eichmann in 61. He did multiple German trials. He wrote a memoir. He did a show foundation and a US Holocaust Museum testimony. So if you want to look at somebody like longitudinal study of how they testify over time, Leon's your guy. And he's also just a

a great human being. But as I suggested, and we've moved away from this obviously in Holocaust studies, but it used to be in the beginning, right? That it was, we all wanted the Nazi sources because we thought that the Nazi sources, some people did, like I didn't, but there was a reliance on written documents by officialdom as sort of the standard. And this was obviously wrong. And we've...

as a discipline, think, you know, been much more willing to look at, as you point out at survivor testimony as evidence, not illustration, you know, that these, this is not just here's a color commentary on the documents, whatever those may be. Right. And in this case, you know, that was absolutely the case, you know, because there, there weren't, there weren't a lot of, a lot of documents and, you know, and again, a lot of the questions that I mentioned in are not really ones that

that documents would have lent themselves to anyway. I would have liked the documents because they would have been nice for dates and times and names and that kind of stuff. But a lot of the questions that I was interested in are questions that survivors could answer. And one of the things that I think is really, really, really important to highlight as I was looking over the book again tonight in preparation for this discussion is, you know, these

Waitman Beorn (31:43.35)
Survivors slash victims, prisoners in the camp were asking the same questions that I was asking and coming up with with analysis and answers to those questions at the time, right? I mean, they because to them it was I mean, to me, it's academic literally, but to them it was I need to understand what's going on here so I can so I can survive. And so if you ignore them, then you're really missing. You're missing the analysis because many of them have done it.

Doris Bergen (32:03.509)
life and death.

Waitman Beorn (32:12.91)
in a lot of ways for you. And there is a lot, a lot of testimony. One of the great things about and this is sort of the backward way into some of this is that because the the Lemberg poet says the Stuttgart trial of some of the perpetrators after the war was the it was literally the second largest in German history after the Frankfurt Auschwitz. It generated hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony.

It had a, it has a, it has a transcript. again, people out there looking for, for a topic. mean, most German trials do not have verbatim transcripts. Um, this one has 10,000 pages of verbatim transcripts. So you can go through the whole thing. Um, but also it, it rounded up 200 plus survivors from around the world in, I think, I think seven to nine different languages, um, which all were accessible to me because they were all translated into German. Right.

And I'm not, again, I'm not doing a link. I'm not doing a sort of close reading analysis. So I think it's OK for me to use the translation in this sense, you know, but it gave me access to lots and lots and lots of people's some of which were, you know, under oath, obviously. And but also there's also the show Foundation stuff. There's also there's also more memoirs than just Leon's. There are other people. Leon Richmond wrote one. Other people wrote memoirs as well.

Um, about this. so, you know, really survivors. Worse were critical. I could not have written this book without survivor testimony. Um, and there were two people in particular who I'll highlight, um, you know, and I didn't get to talk to, they, were, they're both dead in terms of the survivors, but their families were incredibly helpful. Um, well, I guess really three people, cause the ash family gave me, um, essentially interviews with, with Felix ash, um, who.

which had never been published before. so that, you know, again, it's a great resource. But the other two of the families were the families of a guy named Zev Porath and a guy named Herman Lavinter. you know, have, many of you may know that I have this project that I'm working on now, which is a digital reconstruction of Yanovska from these historical sources. And I sort of say that whenever I'm working on that, I feel like Zev and...

Doris Bergen (34:11.296)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (34:37.304)
Herman are like literally behind me, like on my shoulders. But I also feel like that way when I was writing the book as well. And just to give a very brief background into who these people were. Porath was an architect trained in Lviv before the war, and he was employed in the camp as a prisoner architect, a functionary, know, doing basic draftsman work and stuff on the third floor of the camp headquarters building. But because of the

the overseer, guy named Griffel, who was an engineer. was his Griffel wanted to basically create a little resistance cell documentation cell in the, in this third floor technical office. So poor Ath drew drawings of the camp and his architectural drawings are exquisite. mean, they're, are incredibly accurate. And you can, you can show that by looking at the, the Luftwaffe aerial photographs of the camp.

But he also drew sort of what I'm calling sort of more artistic slash, you know, sort of impressionistic drawings of events that happened as well, which are also documented. So he draws a picture of these two rabbis from Yavarov who were forced to dance on this platform. And that's corroborated by other testimonies, you know, by other people unrelated who, you know, never met Zorat. And so I was in contact with his daughter.

Doris Bergen (35:45.089)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (36:02.926)
And she's been amazingly helpful, you know, giving more context into him and what kind of what he was like. And again, these stories of like, you know, after the war, doesn't really, you know, nobody knows that he documented all of this, then took the paint, the drawings with him and escaped from this camp. You know, mean, it's a story that he doesn't really, you know, his family doesn't really tell. And then the other person is Herman Lavinter, Mimi Werner.

Doris Bergen (36:23.67)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (36:32.748)
one of his daughters and another relative also super, super helpful. So Herman Leventer again, very weird position again, which sort of highlights how Yinovsky was in some ways kind of weird. He was the official camp photographer. He's a Jewish prisoner. He's allowed to sort of wander around the camp taking photographs. He also does the obviously the like, you know, the SS glamour shot sort of portrait photographs as well.

Doris Bergen (36:58.347)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (37:02.104)
But he does take some that are clearly clandestine, one of which is, if anybody, maybe for more of our expert listeners, there's a very famous photograph that appears at everything, everybody mentioned music about the Holocaust. And it's this photograph of an orchestra taken sort of from above. And it shows up in everything. It's sort of like a stock photo. Well, that's the Unovska camp orchestra. And that's a photograph taken by Herman Lavinter, who also took his negatives with him and escapes.

Doris Bergen (37:17.857)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (37:32.414)
Also, another famous photograph by him is the very, very famous photograph of three prisoners by the bone grinding machine, which appears again in lots of different texts and things like this. And they gave me his whole album that he has left over. I mean, the photographs of it, which includes some things that were not of sort of immediate interest, but were actually really, really, really useful documents.

of the camp, what it was like, what the buildings looked like, where they were located, these kinds of things. Interestingly, that, there probably are more photographs that are missing because the family said that there's evidence that he donated them, but then nobody can find them and this kind of stuff. But again, you know, these are not just illustrations. And I tried to sort of in the book say, look, you know, these are.

Doris Bergen (38:12.757)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (38:27.778)
These are evidence. These are telling a story. It's not just, I need a photograph of the front gate. Here's a photograph of the front gate. mean, you know, and so there's a long-winded way of saying that really, you know, a variety of survivor sources from different times and different modes of creation, you know, in many ways form the background, the backbone of this book. The perpetrator stuff is important.

Doris Bergen (38:28.982)
Yes.

Doris Bergen (38:43.958)
Yes.

Doris Bergen (38:51.915)
Yes.

Yeah, I think, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (38:57.266)
you know, because they always say stuff that, is, that is true. They don't mean to let out, but they do let it out, you know, but also they're there, they're, it's fraught with all of the lying and everything else that, that we expect. but you know, it's, it's, this has been very much an exercise in, you know, composite composite sources, right? Putting, lots of different sources together and, and figuring out how they fit.

Because nobody, it's that old adage of the, you know, three blind men with an elephant trying to figure out what it is. know, survivors are never going to be to tell you the entire story because they don't have access to all the information. Perpetrators also don't have access to information and they're trying to lie often. You know, we have visual sources which can tell us some things, but not others. so again, in the absence of sort of, and again, even that is a fetishization of Nazi documents, but even the absence of those, we have to figure out.

other ways of thinking about it. And I think I'll be quiet, but I think, you know, the other thing that's important and it gets back to my first goal with this, one of my first goals was I wanted to tell the story of the people involved and let their stories come through.

Doris Bergen (40:12.64)
Yeah, that makes sense. So that the camp almost becomes the means through which you can tell the story of the people rather than the opposite. One theme that you absolutely could not have addressed the way that you did and that you mentioned just now is the theme of escape, which is linked to the importance of resistance and prisoner resistance. And reading the book,

That to me was also something I hadn't heard about before, that there had been not only these individual escapes, which maybe are linked to that proximity factor that you talked about, but that there was a breakout, like a revolt in the camp. And you also talked throughout about other forms of resistance, including non-armed resistance and so on. And I'm wondering if you can explain how those topics escape. It's almost like

Yeah, there's a confinement at the wires, but there's some porousness too. And even the two men that you mentioned, you know, the architect and the photographer, the only way that you have those materials is because they escaped and they escaped with those materials. Can you talk about this theme of escape? And then just to add to the long winded question, I was thinking about how often like in Holocaust studies,

You know, the escape from so before or the revolt at Treblinka, these are presented as kind of almost like exceptions, you know? Okay, you have the crematorium blown up at Auschwitz, but well, that was at the end and nobody escaped from that. But those escapes from which they only survive. But here you have a story of escape that is kind of obscured in many other layers. So yeah, tell me a bit more about escape.

Waitman Beorn (41:46.104)
Right.

Doris Bergen (42:05.888)
forms of resistance and yeah, how you decided to foreground those issues.

Waitman Beorn (42:12.128)
Yeah. So, I mean, again, I, I always think, and when I'm, this is a brief preface to the question, but when I teach the Holocaust, I never start with the Nazis. I always start with, with Jewish life and culture, right? Because Jews are not numbers that are just acted upon in this system, right? I mean, they are in the system, but they are acting against it and they, you know, they, are able to do things, right? And I think that's always important, right? To sort of personify that. And so obviously I was,

looking for forms of resistance, various forms. And I take a very broad definition of what constitutes resistance, know, particularly from someone in the past and the future looking back and saying, I'm going to tell you what resistance is. I generally take a very generous view of that. But one of the things that was like super maddening was the number of times that I'd read a testimony or listen to a testimony or survivors talking and they're telling a story about what would have happened in the camp and what they experienced. then they would say, and then I escaped.

Then they would go on to like their life and hiding or whatever. the fact that they just had escaped from this horrible place never really got a lot of discussion about how they did this. Right. Which is always kind of maddening. You want to be able to like go back in time and say, wait, pause. Can you go back and tell me, you know, how did you manage to escape this really terrible place? But it happened, you know, quite frequently. And you have people that had escaped a couple of times or people that had escaped from

trains to Belzec. They'd escape from the train, jumped off the train to Belzec, which is about 60 miles from Lviv, managed to make it back to the ghetto. And then they get rounded up again during another roundup and then back up in Unovska. mean, Leon Wells doesn't take that route, but Leon Wells escapes and then gets rounded up again and back in Unovska and ends up in the death brigade as a result because he viewed as kind of a troublemaker or whatever.

So one of the things that was first a bit surprising to me is, you know, there were so many escapes. It happened all the time. Frequently, you know, and these are, talking like onesies, twosies people, you know, but not, not a mass breakout, but I think a lot of times, particularly the general public has this view of a concentration camp as this kind of hermetically sealed place that, you know, once you're in there, you're never getting out. Absolutely not the case here. And, another thing that I thought was, was quite surprising.

Waitman Beorn (44:37.262)
or worthy of note perhaps, is that even, you know, we often sort of say that physical violence is kind of the rarest form of resistance for all kinds of completely understandable reasons. But, you know, the number of times that prisoners attacked guards or SS men in the camp, you know, with result is actually was quite surprising, you know, even with no chance of survival, you know, that they would

punch the commandant. This happened at least once. Or attack an SS man. one of my favorite examples of camp resistance in a kind of physical sense is there was a particular SS man who his thing was he would drink and then he would go into the women's camp and go into the barracks and molest the women. And the women in the women's camp got together with some of the resistance members in the men's camp and they came up with a plan which was essentially to create

this kind of like a dead fall trap with spikes on it so that when this guy came to walk into the barracks, he stepped through this thing and his foot went down in these spikes, which happened. It absolutely worked. And this guy was out of action. And the funny thing about this also is that the he was laying there in the camp screaming and the Ukrainian guards apparently he did. They didn't like him either. So they kind of sat in the tower and let him do this. But he never went back in the camp. Right. So so here you have an example of of working together, men and women.

recognizing a victimization and saying, we're going to do what we can to stop this, right? Which I think is just a phenomenal little microcosm into sort of how this works. But also you have all the other forms of resistance. And I try to tease out all the sort of levels of resistance from sort of violence slash escape to, you know, just religious observance or artistic observance or helping behavior for other people.

in the camp and you have all these examples, even examples from people in the ghetto trying to help people in the camp, which is another interesting phenomenon. The connection between Lviv ghetto, which was the third largest in Europe, which actually the ghetto itself had an aid committee for helping prisoners in Linovsk. And they did, they did the best they could. I mean, they were able to set up a stall essentially every time the prisoners were marched into town for forced to take baths.

Waitman Beorn (46:59.096)
which was a horrible experience in a lot of ways for them, but they were able to come out of the baths and, you know, again, the Nazis kind of let them do this. The ghetto could provide, you know, a fresh piece of bread when you come out, came out of the shower. So there was, there's all of that kind of cooperation. And then you have these two, really two armed uprisings in November, 1943. You know, one of them, the one in the camp seems to have been kind of

a little more ad hoc and kind of gone off, perhaps not according to plan, people did escape from the camp itself. And then the more sort of organized one and the one that perhaps it's more than one that we know more about because we have people like Leanne Wells who survived it was the death brigade in the Lichikov forest, you know, about a mile or so away where again, in both instances, prisoners had a plan. It was intentional. was group and they rose up and they

They killed SS men and escaped. And some of them were able to survive as a result. And I think this is important. And I think, as you suggest, a lot of, we'll say, common knowledge about the Holocaust is that these things are sort of exceptions. But I think the more you look at, I mean, there was resistance against the clearing of the Lviv ghetto. I mean, feel like there is...

probably a lot more violent resistance out there than we give it credit for in the popular conception.

Doris Bergen (48:31.83)
Well, and just the simple fact that most of the people carrying out those acts did not live to tell the tale means that you only have the evidence of survivors. I was thinking when you were talking about how Jews inside the ghetto tried to mobilize to help prisoners in the camp, you have some quite interesting passages talking about the roles of the Jewish council in Lviv.

And there's also some involvement there, right? Well, let me let you tell it. Can you say a bit more about how, I guess, that, you know, always much-maligned Jewish councils plays maybe a kind of multi-dimensional role in this case?

Waitman Beorn (49:11.502)
I mean, it's again, one of the this way, you know, the subtitle of the book is the enough to camp and the Holocaust in Lviv because I as I was researching this, you I realized you cannot tell the story without. Lviv and again, people looking for a topic there, I don't know of a great monograph focused solely on the Lviv ghetto. So somebody somebody write that because mine mine is not good enough to be the only one about the Lviv ghetto. Someone needs to do that.

But it was, again, you it's one of those situations where when you look at what survivors are saying and writing, they don't always agree on how they think about the Jewish council. You know, the same person can get, you know, rave reviews from one person and, you know, be condemned by another. Same thing with the prison functionaries in the camp, all of which were predominantly Jewish, because again, they didn't, they couldn't sort of draw on the, the, the Dachau model of the

the German prisoner, German criminal thing. So, you you sort of have the first chairman of the Judenrat was a guy named Parnas, Josef Parnas. And by all marks, he gets good marks. You know, he's the first guy, he's doing the best he can. He resists handing people over as best he can and ends up being killed for it. And most people are sort of happy with that. The second guy is much less, much less

resistant. But again, we went that's understandable. The person he's replacing just got murdered for for resisting. And so it's understandable that we might think that way. But as a group, Jewish Council, think it had. I remember the number, but like 4000 employees or something like this, you know, like. So, I mean, they have all kinds of committees. mean, they.

Doris Bergen (51:01.62)
It was a very large number. remember that too.

Waitman Beorn (51:07.82)
What's amazing and important for people, for readers, know, is that here you have a group of people playing a game that's absolutely rigged against them in every single way and are still doing the best they can to help. And when you look at the documents from the Lviv archives, the Ukrainian archives and ones that are copied in Holocaust with them in DC, that are documents created by the Lviv ghetto, again, looking at them in

in the specifics, but it tells you a lot about the larger issue. one of the things I remember, I always remember this, is that there was a sort of like a hack, like hacks for the how to hack living in the ghetto. A little piece of advice, know, like if you boil 10 pounds of ash, you can make lye that you can take a bath with that will help keep you clean and help get, if you want to get rid of lice, here's how you do that. People sharing ideas about how to...

how to overcome the situation, as well as the things like the aid committee, know, who would, you even though the fact that people in the ghetto were living horrible, you know, impoverished lives, were still trying to get together packages and sort of care packages they could, were allowed to distribute in the camp itself, right? Even though there's no funding, obviously, for this. So it's, again, it's, it's this continue, it's sort of the Holocaust SEDEKA idea, right? That, you know, here you have,

something that is common to the Jewish communities everywhere, both before and after the Holocaust. it takes on even greater importance in the context Holocaust. Things like soup kitchens, know, that the ghetto is running soup kitchens. I mean, these are not unique to the Lviv. But for a general reader, you know, it's an introduction to something that's happening in lots of other ghettos as well. it's something that I think one of the things that Lviv, again, not unique to the Holocaust, but highlights is, again, this

situation where people are doing the best they can in an environment that's stacked against them, you know, in an environment in which they don't know what we know is going to happen and they're trying to sort of do the, the best of it.

Doris Bergen (53:18.016)
Yeah. A theme that really runs through your whole book is the theme about the importance of labor. And you think about Janowska as a like multi-purpose camp and you talk about it, it is a killing center in its own way, but it's really, it's a transit camp. There's a woman's camp there, but it's really very focused on labor at, you know, of many different kinds.

And I was struck by you have a couple different passages where you kind of parse out like some of the different categories or hierarchies of labor, the importance of skilled labor, the kind of vitamin labor, the labor that is destruction through work and the labor that is about erasing the killing and like it just goes on and on. And do you think that in this way, Yanovska is distinctive?

Or is it that kind of phenomenon that you described at the beginning, of encapsulating or emblematic of the process of the Holocaust as a whole?

Waitman Beorn (54:27.31)
And I think I would say that one of the things that I think is relatively unique about Yenovska in general is that it fulfills all of these functions simultaneously for its whole existence, which is not something that I'm super familiar with seeing elsewhere in the Holocaust, particularly the idea of a transit camp that's functioning as such. Because we think about in a place like Westerbork or Transy or whatever, but that's pretty much all they're doing is as a transit.

Likewise, as a killing center, it's not Belzec, but it's also not sort of a daily thing. It is a daily thing, but it's not sort of the normal, if you will, I'm using Syracuse here for audience, but the normal sort of attrition that takes place in a place like Dhaka. These are dedicated killings that take place throughout the life of the camp. And Maidanek, which again, I don't have anything against Maidanek, but

know, my Donic is often added to Auschwitz and and Belzec and so we were in Drupilinka as one of these extermination centers. But really, it didn't do that except for very short period of time, you know, in 1943. Right. Even though it did have gas chambers, you know, but it wasn't it really wasn't sort of a murderous camp in that sense, an extermination camp for most of its existence. You know, it is and you know, it then fills in. When Belzec temporary closes.

And also in Bell's permanent clothes, it becomes sort of the, now we're going to do this here. Anyway, so that's a bit about the killing, but the labor piece, I think it is sort of emblematic of lots of different kinds of labor that you see across the camp system. The first of which is actually building the camp itself. For the most part, there's not a lot of the buildings that in the camp that predate the camp itself.

the Deutschausrüstungswerk or the DAW side. There are some, but really the first task is building in the camp. And this is one of the worst jobs because not only is it grueling physical outdoor labor, you're never leaving the camp. At least when you're working in, you know, the uniform factory downtown Lviv or whatever, you get to go out of the camp, which again, that's great, particularly when you live in Lviv because you have the connections and those kinds of things. so, you know, this is not an earth shattering.

Waitman Beorn (56:51.958)
finding, but your labor assignment was critical to your chances of survival. But again, thinking about it from a sort of multi-perspective angle, it's also important for the Nazis, which is why the Svangsobites Lager gets built in the first place, which is this competition, competitive camp to the DAW, which was the first camp that was built. And it's because, my feeling is it's because Kotzmann, the

SSM police leader in Lviv, he's trying to advance himself as well. And he knows that the way to do this is to control the labor in the region, the free labor in the region, which is, which is Jewish labor. And part of this is way to create favor with Himmler because Himmler wants to also build this highway from Eastern Poland to Rostov-on-Don, this military highway. And so that's one of the things that a lot of the Jews from Galicia end up working in these. Again, another topic that needs

study because these are like sort of very temporary moving camps that are moving along building this highway. But anyway, Jews from Lviv and from the Glicia are supplied to this as well via Zwangsarbeid's Lager, which is under Katzmann's control. And that's just the sort of professional, if you will, reason. But there's also the expropriation piece and there's lots of corruption for the Nazis and the involved in this labor. of the kinds of labor, there are definitely sort of

kinds that you see. Obviously, the first one is construction, right, of the camp itself, which is kind of ongoing, know, which Paul Jessica has this shown as well with Auschwitz, you know, this is many camps, construction is kind of a constant thing that's happening. But there's also the the renting of prisoners to any number of concerns in Lviv itself.

in any number of numbers from, you know, ones and twos and threes and fours to hundreds. You're working in everything from the city parks and gardening, you know, to working in uniform factories, breweries, you know, all these kinds of places. And that's and then people are having to these these employers are employers. I'm using scare quotes again, are paying the SS for the prisoners ostensibly right to provide for their

Waitman Beorn (59:16.942)
care and management keeping, but really just it's direct profits going to the SS. And there's, as I said, any number of examples. And then there's the other piece, which is sort of the punitive piece of prisoners essentially just being worked literally to death. And again, the survivors are explicit about this, which is great. They tell you the example.

prisoners being forced to carry a truck chassis back and forth across the yard until they drop. Or one day they have to take all these tree stumps and put them in a big hole. And the next day they got to take them out of the hole. The sort of most, in some ways, the most relatable example to me was, so a lot of the prisoners would work, as I said, in these factories or places outside of the camp during the week. But on Sunday, those places were closed, so they didn't work.

And they were in some ways allowed to kind of stay in the camp without working, but the SS didn't like that. So they would tear up little bits of paper and sprinkle them all over the parade ground and then make them go out and pick them up. Just complete busy work, you know, which also then exposes them to all the all the dangers of the camp in and of itself. you know, and then that's, you know, that was, I would say, certainly a minority of the kinds of labor that happened there. But there was also obviously

just a lack of care. And the other example, the one that you brought up, the vitamin work, right? Which comes from the Polish for, I think, bricks, boards, and planks or something like that, which is BCD in Polish. And the prisoners, so the prisoners call it vitamin work. But basically, because the camp was right next to a rail spur, a sort of commercial station, not a passenger station,

they were also forced to unload trains. And so after a hard day of laboring wherever else they were laboring, oftentimes that night they'd have to go over and unload these heavy materials from these trains and run 300 meters or so to the camp and back and forth. And this is something that survivors talk about, 100 people die as a result of this.

Doris Bergen (01:01:38.792)
And did women work alongside men in any of those work sites? Or the women's camp, did they not have labor assignments?

Waitman Beorn (01:01:42.964)
in.

So the you know, it's unclear exactly. There's not a women's camp until the spring or so of 43. But you do have women in the camp, but it's a very gendered. Their roles are very gendered. They're working in the tailor shop and the laundry. I mean, what I'm saying is gendered. mean, like sexists are typically gendered, right? Women's work kind of thing. I don't think they were being.

Doris Bergen (01:01:54.464)
That's what I remember, it's late.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:15.342)
put on those jobs. you know, I mean, it's possible.

Doris Bergen (01:02:22.066)
One last question on the labor subject, which is you use the term slave labor and you explain that you did that very sort of consciously and thoughtfully. Why do think it's important to use that term slave labor as opposed to forced labor, coerced labor, prison labor?

Waitman Beorn (01:02:42.21)
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think obviously words are important. And, you know, when someone has literally total control over someone's body life, life and death, meaning they can go out and just kill them if they want, or they can hand them over to someone else for a price, which is essentially what was happening for this labor. I think slave labor is the most appropriate designator. I mean, because

forced labor is also bad, but it's more like Father Dave Watt talks about rounding up local civilians and making them go dig a pit for the shootings or whatever, which is bad and forced, but it's not the same thing as slave labor. Prison labor in a certain sense, prisoner in a certain sense even suggests a administrative, a judicial system that

that in some way has punishing someone for something. So, I mean, I think I think, you know, slave labor is most important. And if it makes us think about other examples of slave labor in the past, then that's good, too, you know, because I think that's that's fine, you know, because these are analogous situations and identical, but they are it is slave labor, you know, and again, not to put too fine a point on it. But there was I think it was a doc how

Doris Bergen (01:03:52.736)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:09.358)
portion and out a sub camp called the plantation, you know, by the prisoners, know, prisoners themselves, survivors themselves talk about being slave labor. That's how they saw themselves sometimes in the, in the biblical sense. but sometimes just saying where we were slaves. And so I think, you know, that's, that's the most reasonable term to use.

Doris Bergen (01:04:27.82)
Yeah, know, that makes sense. Now I want to talk about the perpetrators a bit because as you mentioned at the beginning, your first book, Marching into Darkness, that's also a great book, by the way, I've used that with classes. It's really focused on the perpetrators in that case on the Wehrmacht and the crimes in Belarus.

And your book, it pays a lot of attention to the perpetrators. And I think it does so in a quite an interesting way. First, there are those individuals like Wilhous, who just like jump off the page with their intense cruelty. You talk about his role as like literally cultivating, you know, a culture of cruelty among the guards, the SS men.

at the camp. So you have those individuals, but it's really important to you to emphasize, no, these are not, you know, aliens from another planet or sadists, but to really talk about them as regular guys, recognizable. But maybe the more important kind of angle of your analysis of the perpetrators is about the networks, about the networks in the community.

you show, look, first of all, lot of these guys, had a lot in common. You have Volksdorchen from the borderlands, from the ethnic German minorities in various places. You have guys who knew each other sometimes before, often stuck together during and also after their placement at Yanovska. And I was reminded of the book by Lian Fuji about genocide in Rwanda called Killing Neighbors, where Fuji says basically,

look, show me who five of some God's friends were and I can tell you if he was a genocidal, you know, killer or not. Like people do this work in groups and in networks. And I would love for you to say a bit more about sort of how you came to that insight, both including those individuals and looking at the importance of leadership and examples, but also really focusing on

Doris Bergen (01:06:42.336)
the networks on the connections among the perpetrators.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:47.374)
Yeah, I I love to talk about this network piece because I did a whole chapter on it. And I think it was really, it's really insightful and it's really suggestive and I think is a great jumping off point for more work. So I'll come back to that in the second part. You know, with individuals, I think one of the things that is important, and I've suggested this already, is that, know, Yanovska is not Auschwitz.

It's not Dachau. It's not the of the model camp. It's amateur hour all day, every day. The people that are in charge are, you the Nazis are not sending their best, right? To the extent that they have, you know, their best, but these are not like really great human beings. they're not even, and I'm not saying that even in a moral sense. I'm saying they're not really particularly competent, you know, organized human beings, right?

They're just not they're not great. They're not well educated. Vilhals is not particularly literate. You know, even there's funny stories that his wife, you know, after the war, when when she's being questioned, you know, turns out that she got arrested multiple times for like driving a license and running fake unauthorized gambling machines. And, you know, they're they're they're all sort of grifters and and people that could only have risen to the rank that they're rising in a Nazi state in the first place.

But that that's immaterial in the sense that they're still the ones that are in charge. And and it that in a certain sense leads to, you know, I mean, this this is leadership, whether it's good leadership or bad leadership, leadership is example. And, you know, Wilhaus is the leader. know, Gabao is not great either, but, you know, he's also he's also a bad guy and he sets an example that's also bad. But, you know, the the.

Villehouse leads by example in his own personal cruelty, his acceptance of cruelty. I suggested in the book, you know, again, I don't play the suffering Olympics. You know, I don't think that there's particularly value necessarily in saying that one place was worse than the other. With the caveat that survivors themselves say this. And again, I think it's important to give survivors credit. That's what they're saying. You know, one of the

Waitman Beorn (01:09:13.644)
Survivors, Stanislav Kokolovska said, you know, Unovska was the worst camp I was in. And she'd been in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. And so again, that's certainly her opinion, but I think it's worth giving weight to. Mikhail Borovits said it was the University of Criminals. That's where they were taught. that was one of the sort of ways in which I began looking at this as a network as well, which I'll get to. I will just say that...

I was particularly sort of as someone that I thought was, I think part of being in Holocaust story is you read them and you're like, that's the worst thing I've ever read. And then later on, you read something else. You're no, that's the worst thing I've ever read. But when I was looking at all the stuff that was happening here, I kind of began to think that, gosh, this is a particularly nasty place with really, really horrible things going on. We can talk about sort of the patterns if you want later. But just understand that there

This is a place where really, really awful cruelty is taking place in a way that I think is at least suggestively important. Every camp had its sadist, had its, or had its bad people that were notorious for committing atrocities, but this place seemed to have, we'll say more than its fair share. But the network piece was something that really came, again, and it's much, it's much.

in part due in part to the geography piece, because one of the things and again, this is a again, a hard, hard one piece of advice for grad students and young historians out there is capture the data. And so one of the things that I did as I was going through, particularly these these perpetrator testimonies after the war, because they were often asked to sort of

give a biographical rundown of where they were. And I just started making a spreadsheet of the person, where he was, know, what dates he was there, if I could determine that. And then I would try to find that place because sometimes you to do the transliteration from the German to the Polish or the Ukrainian. And in doing that, I had about 70 distinct individuals.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:37.55)
and about 400 different geographic locations from birth to whenever that document was created in the post-war period. And the first thing that I did was, and this is part of my interest in digital humanities, as well as geographic stuff, I put them into a program called Gephi, which is basically an open source social network program. You can put Twitter into it, you can put any kind of data and begin to sort of

connections. And what this did was visualize where these people intersected on the ground in an abstract network diagram of this. And again, like any good digital humanities project or project using computers, it doesn't answer the question. It just says, here's where people overlapped. And then I have to go back and figure out, okay, what does that mean?

Were they were they there at the same time? Because all it shows me is is that they have these places in common. But, you know, when I go back, I noted that, you know, gosh, these these people were in the same. They served in the Sunderdienst together or they served in the sculptures together at the same time or two guys who worked in the same factory before the war, the same Siemens factory. Did they know each other? Can't prove it, but, you know, chances are good. And did they have similar experiences that go through the same?

training camps, as many of them go through this place called the Haida Lager in Debitse. And so that's one sort of set of shared experiences that was important. Right. And I'll get to the sort of what I think the meaning might be in a minute. But so that's one. So there's sort of the input piece. There's the origin piece. So then I started to say, OK, where are these people born? And I literally and again, this folks out there, this is not high tech stuff. I put it into Google Maps. I just plotted all the plotted all the birthplaces.

of all these guys in the Google Maps. Again, it's from perpetrators, but it's not something they're going to lie about for most part. And what I discovered was crazy that there were probably eight or 10 people in two different groups who grew up within 70 miles of each other as ethnic Germans in the Spina region of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and then in Eastern Silesia on the border with Poland. What are the chances that you're an ethnic German living in a, you know,

Waitman Beorn (01:14:03.624)
non-German territory and you don't know the other people in that area. Maybe they don't know each other, but that's a pretty close grouping. The last thing that the network showed is, again, once you start bringing time into this, is that they also then went out from Yinovska, other places, and took over very small camps or even ghettos in other places, usually in Galicia.

And then sometimes came back, you know, after those places were liquidated, they would end up back at UNOSCA. So that's what the data tells me. That's what the visualization of the data tells me that I would never have been able to figure out if I was just reading documents as we do normally. So I had to visualize that, had to visualize those 400 points of existence to see this. And so then I started thinking, okay, what does this mean? You know, and I think...

I think it's very suggestive. again, this something that I think would be great for people to do with all different kinds of populations of perpetrators. But I think it suggests a couple of things. One is that there is an element of familiarity with these people. what is the significance of that? one example is once these people go out, there is already an informal connection.

and informal communication even, right? So the example I show in the book is this guy named Adolf Kolonko who goes out from Unovska. First he was at Travniky, so again, we're drawing connections, but he comes from Travniky with Ukrainian guards that he then supervises at Unovska. And then he's sent out to a place called Grodek-Yagionsky to supervise essentially the rump, what was left over from the ghetto in like a little tiny work camp. When it comes time to liquidate that camp,

Vilhaus, his old boss, just picks the phone up and says, I'm sending out Yanovska SS men to your camp and we're going to liquidate your camp. And that's how quickly that happens. And again, these are things that are very, difficult to find in the source data, but they suggest relationships that had importance.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:25.844)
in the in how the Holocaust takes place, right? You didn't need to go through any offices in Lviv and get orders from the SS. just, know, Katzmann says I want I want the camps liquidated and Wheelhouse knows he can call on the people. So there's that. There's also, I think. And this gets to me, Haborovitz is statement of sort of the University of Criminals. What are they learning in UNOSCA that they are then carrying with them?

other places and vice versa. know, what are they bringing? If they're going someplace before, know, what are they bringing to you? You know, and I'm thinking about, this is, this is a transmission of not just people, but, skills and knowledge and behaviors. you know, that they're, that they're bringing with them. And again, it's suggestive, you know, but there are similar things. There's a guy named Fox who also, for example, like to shoot to target practice of shooting of prisoners.

Which is something that took place in Urofske as well. Is this something that's learned? Right. Because here you have a group of people that all have a similar job. what knowledge, what transmissions are they bringing with them? What relationships? And this speaks to a larger issue that, again, I don't think I answer it because it's incredibly complex. But one of the things I discovered in the course of doing this other project of visualizing the camp

I was trying to figure out what the women's camp barracks looked like. And I only had one image, which was not all of this women's camp. And it happened to be in Birkenau, as you are, as Holocaust historian, with a group of students. And I was looking at one of the barracks in B1B of Birkenau, the women's camp over there. And I was like, that looks just like this photograph.

And I ended up getting in touch with the archives at at Auschwitz. And they said, yeah, this is a this is a Reichsarbeitstings, the Reichs Labor Service prefab hut. And it was only used it was used only in the in the non brick barracks side of the women's camp in Birkenau. The image, the one that's still standing in Birkenau is the one that was sort of the abortion barracks. But anyway, it's identical. So this

Waitman Beorn (01:18:52.822)
So in other words, the women's barracks at Yanovska are using the same barric prefabricated barracks that the women's camp at Auschwitz is using. Same model. Exactly. And the reason I went in that in that little like rabbit hole is is that just a coincidence or or was that like some kind of okay if you have women in a camp, you put them in these barracks.

And we know this because we were, I don't know, I don't know the answer to this, but I'm suggesting that, you know, there are these informal modes of communication or informal sort of understandings, some of which may be carried by these guys that have impact in sort of how these things function. And so I think that's one of the really important things about visualizing this and also about thinking about who these guards are and

what it might mean that they knew each other. And I'm not suggesting that made them buddies, knowing someone doesn't mean that you're friends with them, there are relationships there that I think are particularly important. I don't know that answered the network question, but I think there's a lot more to be done in that area, but I'm only scratching the surface of it.

Doris Bergen (01:19:54.912)
Mm-hmm.

Doris Bergen (01:20:11.244)
Yeah. Well, because I was also thinking about in the way that people who know each other, they can egg each other on. They can push each other to further extremes. And like you said, they know, OK, who can I give this task to because they're going to do it? And I was thinking, and this brings me to the next question I wanted to ask, which was about the sort of graphic nature of a lot of the material and the violence in your book. And when you gave the example of,

said Fox and how he was practicing target, like shooting at targets with prisoners. I was remembering, was he the guy who would shoot the prisoners with a coin in their hand? And that came up with some other people too. So I was thinking even very specific forms of gratuitous cruelty could be passed on or learned from place to place. In your book, there's

Waitman Beorn (01:20:51.662)
I think so, yeah, yeah, I he's the one.

Doris Bergen (01:21:09.096)
many moments of, yeah, like terrible brutality, massacres of elderly people, of children, sexual violence against women and girls, a topic that people like Alyssa Milander, Regina Mulhoyser, others in our field have really done incredible work to elucidate. And I was thinking both about, you know, why it's important to talk

openly about these topics. and I wanted to name one more person, Justyna Matkowska, who's written about sexual violence against Romani women and girls in the Holocaust. Both why it's important to talk about these topics, why you think it's important maybe not to look away, or let's say ask the question a different way. Where do you draw the line? You know, are there things where you think, no,

I'm not going to show this. I'm not going to include this photograph. I'm not going to quote even this survivor account. So that's one thing I want to ask. And the second thing I wanted to ask is how do you deal with your own response as a scholar? Because, you know, sometimes people say to me, you must get numb when you work on the Holocaust all the time. And my answer always is, unfortunately, you don't get numb.

I think if anything, opposite thing happens because the more that you know, the more you can sort of fill in the blanks often of things that aren't spelled out. So yeah, can you talk about how you decided what am I going to include? Why is it important? When do I draw a line and how do I keep myself, I don't know, from the nightmares or, you know?

Waitman Beorn (01:22:58.658)
Yeah, I mean, think, I mean, the first question about what we include and what we don't is a really great one. And it's fraught. And I don't think I have the right or wrong answer to it. I think the most important consideration is, particularly when we're thinking about graphic violence, is what's your reasoning? Do you have a reason?

to include this, or is it just, and again, scare quotes here, just shock value of like, you're trying to sort of shock your reader. And I hope that nothing I put in the book was just for shock value. know, looking at, and again, I was looking over it again before we talked, you know, a lot of it seems kind of like just punch after punch after punch, but...

There's a method there, I think, which is showing a pattern and is saying, you know, this is not a one-off, for example, of a particular kind of violence, but this is something that happens over and over again and that multiple survivors again have noted. then that demands art. Now we have a pattern and patterns demand explanation, right? We don't necessarily need an explanation or need to hear about every single horrible thing that a person does because that can be, I think, become gratuitous.

but if there seems to be a pattern behind it, and particularly when survivors themselves are saying, I mean, there's a, there's an example that I talk about in the book of a young guy who basically, you know, it's, it's toxic masculinity, you know, taken to 11, you know, he's a guy that's trying to prove himself, you know, as a man, he gets made fun of for looking like a kid and et cetera, et cetera. And so he, he ends up doing these things to try to, to sort of prove himself, which ends up making him kind of worse than

some other guys, know, that demands an explanation. And I think, you know, in terms of, for example, images, I only show, there's only one image really that I have as one of the photographs that is close to that line and it comes from the LaVive pogrom. But there were lots of images I could have chosen. And I chose one in which the woman was at least sort of fully clothed and not...

Waitman Beorn (01:25:21.826)
It wasn't, it's certainly, and I described, I described some of the other things that happened, but I tried to sort of, I wanted to illustrate that one, at once, sort of the, the horrible nature of this and the fact that it's public and it's an important precursor to what happens in Unopsca. But also there were, there were lots of other, lots of other terrible images from that, that, that I wouldn't choose, that I wouldn't choose to show. Because I think one of the considerations that we always should have is, you know, are we victimizing these people again?

They didn't give permission for these images to be taken of them in the first place. In the second place, these images, we're talking about visual sources, are literally the worst day of their life, most likely. And if we're showing them that we need to have a good reason beyond window dressing to it. But I think, and I try to address this head on where I say, I'm not.

I'm not trying to do this out of an act of historical voyeurism. want to understand these and to sort of, because I think it's important to understand how these things happen and what the patterns are, why these things are taking place, but also again, to honor the fact that the survivors themselves were trying to figure this out at the same time. And many of them are giving me the answers to it. I mean, it wasn't me for example, I I agree and I could have come into that conclusion myself, but it's literally survivors.

testifying and say, yeah, this guy was clearly being picked on as a boyish looking guy and was trying to prove himself. That's survivors. That's survivors making that analysis and saying, and I think it's important to reinforce that. Say, they got it. They got it right. I mean, because prisoners anywhere in a regular prison or in the camp, all they have to do when they're not trying to stay alive is to observe everybody else. Right. So exactly. And so they

Doris Bergen (01:27:13.728)
which is part of their stay alive, frankly.

Waitman Beorn (01:27:18.294)
Of course, they have really good analyses of what's going on. mean, there's another example of, you know, a really interesting moment where prisoner functionaries essentially murdered by the SS, you know, and but everybody knows what really happened and why and why it happened right in the camp. It's, know, they have nothing to do again, apart from surviving, of observing and listening to like people telling, I heard this and I heard that, you know, which is not always accurate, but oftentimes it is.

And I think, you know, again, with the sexual violence piece, that's really difficult. But again, I think it's important because it is a specific kind of victimization that women suffered in the Holocaust. And it deserves to be known that that happened and not to let the Nazis get away with this. The conventional wisdom of, well, because of the Nuremberg laws, they didn't they didn't participate in sexual violence. Well, of course they did very much so. And that actually made it.

because of the Nuremberg laws, made it more deadly for the people that were involved because they're sort of evidence of the crime as it were. You know, and so I think I think that that's important because again, thinking about the ways in which women suffer differently can not better worse, but differently than men. Sexual violence and sexualized violence is a piece and sexualized violence is something that extends beyond just women, because then you have, you know, again.

people being naked to force nudity in of itself, humiliation. And this was against both men and women targeting of genitals, etc, etc. Again, both men and women experienced this. And it's important. And it sort of, again, speaks to this culture of of impunity, of public publicness in the context of the camp. And what I would call sort of just a lack of supervision that they could get away with.

whatever they wanted because number one, the people in charge didn't care. And also, and I try to suggest this in a nuanced way, because the guy in charge of the camp is a lieutenant, that's the highest ranking person. And again, I'm not suggesting that like Rudolph Hess is like some saint, but at least even among the SS, there was this idea that, you know, we are these cultured people and we...

Waitman Beorn (01:29:40.462)
We allow a certain kind of violence, but not another kind of violence that that that kind of sort of really gratuitous intimate violence that we see again. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but you know, if you're a Colonel in the SS in charge of Auschwitz or a major in charge of my Donic, you could there's at least this idea that if I caught you, you know, doing these things that that's not not not out of any care for the for the victim, but that this is a bad discipline sort of thing and you shouldn't do this. Well, there's none of that.

I mean, there's absolutely, you can do whatever you want. No one's gonna stop you from doing it. I think that demands explanation. And that makes it, sorry, go ahead.

Doris Bergen (01:30:18.988)
Yeah. Now, wait a minute, maybe predictably you sidestepped the personal part of the question. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:25.128)
I'm coming back to it. had inside that I'm coming back. So the personal piece, think I think it's really important. And I will say that the where it's really hit me the most is with children. And I don't think this is a unique thing to me. And I also want to be very clear that I don't think you have to have children to to be concerned with with children being being murdered or.

being abused, right? With that being said, it hits me differently as a father than it did before I became a parent. Again, doesn't it make me better or worse or more sympathetic? But it just personally, I have a daughter. I now think of things differently. And so when I read, particularly about sort of the... I mean, in case, in context of Genoske, there really weren't children in the camp. So it's not...

It's not in that sense for the like in that Kenosha sense. but again, again, this is how you know, connected during the great action in August. Nobody gets deported from Lviv first. They get deported to Yanovska. The trains are organized in Yanovska with all the people of all walks of life. Sometimes we have to stay there for days until until they get enough. So.

So there you have families, you know, these kinds of things. And that hits differently now. You know, I mean, obviously it doesn't, I'm not numb to the other kinds of stuff that's going on. I guess, I don't know. mean, it's, a certain level, I guess it's nice. The Yinovska story is, again, scare quotes here. It's nice because there is...

there are SS guys get killed in the end and there is a breakout, know, and, you know, there, is, I could look at these forms of resistance, you know, and sort of see a lot of that. It wasn't, it wasn't always a sort of endless flow to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. If I was looking at that, at that, you know, but I, but I think it's, you know, as you point out, it's important to, to recognize that and to sort of keep that. And I think.

Waitman Beorn (01:32:51.64)
to take breaks sometimes, you know, and just kind of be like, you know, like, this was, this was kind of unrelated, but I remember I was, I was with my, my partner at the time and we were in Yad Vashem and I was looking at some testimonies and they weren't, they weren't, they didn't have anything to do with Yanovskoy. And so even before I even had children and she happened to be listening to them with me and the, the, the testimony, I'm not laughing.

The testimony was this woman was talking about how she was fleeing in the woods. I don't know the context was. She was running away from the I guess it was I don't know. The Nazis were chasing her, very mocked, and somebody with her child. And then at some point, there's no more child in the story. And the interviewer was asking her, like, what was the name of your child? And she didn't.

remember or couldn't remember or didn't know. And at that point it was kind like, okay, that's it for the day. That's too much. That's a lot. And I had some of those moments with Yanovskaya as well. of like, that's sufficient for today. But I guess, and without putting, and again, I'm not trying to center myself in the story because it's not about me.

But it was nice to have, going back to one of your original questions, to have families of survivors who I could sort of feel like I'm, they're going to get to see this book and they're going to get, and they're going to get to have their stories told in this book, you know, and that's, that's cool. I mean, and the ones that I've been in contact with have been very appreciative of the fact that, you know, somebody was interested in, in this place that

was significant to their family, you know, but hadn't really received a lot of coverage. And I will also point out, I didn't make it quite as clear in the acknowledgments because I needed to do that for them, but there were some families of perpetrators who also I've been in contact with who have been, I would say, helpful and forthcoming about their own family history, which is difficult in a different way.

Waitman Beorn (01:35:18.286)
for them, but also that is also incredibly important in understanding these stories as well, particularly the post-war piece.

Doris Bergen (01:35:27.276)
Yeah, yeah. Now, wait a minute. feel like we covered a lot of ground. And I have just a couple more pretty short questions. You have energy.

Waitman Beorn (01:35:36.792)
Shoot, I mean, I'm in charge. We can go as long as you want.

Doris Bergen (01:35:39.509)
Okay, so we can keep going. Some of the topics that I wanted to cover, we've already discussed, like you talked about the trial, and I think that was really important and the importance of those testimonies. I wanted to just ask you to talk a bit about the death brigade. Like you mentioned it and how like that's something really important where Yanovska was like the training center at that famous photograph of the bone grinder. And you also mentioned

And this is what I want to ask you to say more about that strange tension between on the one hand, killers who were really like arrogant in their pride of, you know, how many Jews they've killed, how many, you know, lives they've destroyed, how many this, how much that, and this sometimes also, you know, enriching themselves and so on, a kind of impunity. And then this obsession.

with now we have to dig up those mass graves and we have to burn these bodies and we have to grind up, know, and destroy the evidence.

What is about, what is that about that contradiction or that tension? Like, how do you account for that?

Waitman Beorn (01:36:55.471)
I think you've hit the nail on the in a certain sense. I mean, think the first thing that comes to mind is that, again,

The people in charge are not idiots. However much they may have hated Jews and were, you know, Eichmann happy to jump into his grave knowing that he, you know, killed six million of them or whatever. They also were not stupid enough to think that the rest of the world believed that. Right. So they were cognizant of the fact that the rest of the world would, you know, disagree and think that and call them criminals for this.

and there's a really funny, again, I'm using funny and scary quotes, but there's a funny sort of irony here in that one of the first war crimes investigations of the second world war was the Nazis who did a very sort of forensic anthropological investigation at the ketene forest, you know, and, and we're like, here's, we're documenting war crimes and here are the Soviets. So they had firsthand evidence of what, would happen when,

Doris Bergen (01:37:54.038)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:38:04.674)
war crimes are sort of unearthed and figuratively and rubbed in their face. And, you know, they obviously knew by the time that they started doing this that the Soviets are going to be taking that territory, even if they don't want to admit it to themselves. And in fact, you know, it's some of Rabbi Wise's, Stephen Wise in the United States, some of his statements are on the radar of the Nazis, which is one of the reasons why they decided to do this in the first place. And they send Paul Bloble, the former Einsatzgruppen,

guy to sort of figure out again, in front of a very twisted German scientific way, what's the best way to do this? And then they end up, he starts out at at the Reinhard camps and then ends up establishing, as you say, the school at UNOSCA. And so I think, you know, it's, it's at this point, it's, it's, it's, it's not actually super paradoxical. You know, it's, it's, it's, they, they knew that they, what they were doing was wrong. I mean, again,

Would be viewed as wrong. I'm not saying they knew it was wrong in their in their own mind, but they knew be viewed as wrong. And there was always this sort of idea of secrecy, right? Going back to to him or his pose and speech about how you know, it's somebody wrote. I quote a scholar in the book who sort of says that part of the part of the deception of the Holocaust was from the Germans themselves in the sense of, you know, there there's this idea of the of the Holocaust as this kind of secret mission.

carried out by the SS, you know, that they have to bear, they have to bear that, but they don't want to put that burden on, on the local German population. But I think when it comes to places like, like the death brigade, I mean, it's, it's really just destroying the evidence. what's, what's kind of remarkable is the fact that they even try because there's just so much evidence that they can't really destroy it, you know, in the first place. Yeah.

Doris Bergen (01:39:49.761)
Well, the thing is, it's so massive. And that's what I mean. It's not, yeah, like I understand that they realize, in the odds of the world, you know, we are terrible, but it's such an impossible, impossible task. And even you look at those pictures of that bone grinder, you're like, okay, maybe you have two acres or something. You know what I mean? But like, they're talking about killing sites that cover, you know,

Waitman Beorn (01:40:05.496)
Yeah, I mean it.

Doris Bergen (01:40:19.402)
hundreds of square miles that extend over an incredibly vast territory like it's it's completely out of proportion to anything possible.

Waitman Beorn (01:40:27.532)
Well, I I often kind of, I often kind of think, you know, again, sort of humorously about, you know, some SS guy being told, okay, now you have to go find all the places that we shot people in Eastern Europe and dig them up and destroy them. And he's like, you know, like I

Doris Bergen (01:40:40.618)
And I have to find some people, survivors who are still alive, who could do all that work.

Waitman Beorn (01:40:44.598)
Yeah, you know, like we have known we don't, you know, we killed people in every little town in Poland. Like, how can we possibly go and dig all this up and destroy it? You know, but again, it happened again and again, sort of plays this this centralized role in that, because then it becomes the place that they train these guys who then go out and try to do that elsewhere. You know, and again, again, it's it's it's survivors who, again, are telling the story. You know, like

Leon Wells is one of the ones that sort of he breaks it down. He's like, there were like, I'm forgetting the number, but, know, 10 specific like tasks that everybody was divided up into like, doing these 10 Pacific tasks, you know, to accomplish this, you know, and it's, it becomes a really important, you know, both, both my network perspective of like, again, you're not at the center of a network of knowledge. But also it's the

It's the central incubator for the revolt.

Doris Bergen (01:41:46.016)
Yes, very important. So I wanted to ask a final question about the, I guess, connections between past and present. The only place, at least, that I noticed in your book where you mention the current war in Ukraine is in a very moving passage in the Acknowledgements where you thank scholars in Ukraine.

including some of whom answered your questions literally from the front. And I was thinking about that and how the shadow of war and wars, you know, hangs over our time, like literally this very, very instant. And even some of the kinds of investigations, maybe not so much yours with L'viv, but

many other parts of Ukraine that scholars in our kind of cohort walked around in and gathered information and they can't do that anymore. Those, you know what I mean? And I was wondering if you could talk about how the present, different presence, because no one writes a book in a minute, but I guess I'm thinking particularly of war in Ukraine, how they seeped into your work and where you see that.

kind of influence in your book.

Waitman Beorn (01:43:10.346)
Yeah, mean, I think so the visits that I undertook two visits to Ukraine to do this, to do the work. One of which I took two undergraduate students with me to sort of be research assistant, which was great because we went in the archives and everything. And they were in, I think, 2017, 2018 or 2018, 2019. So before the most recent invasion.

Doris Bergen (01:43:34.87)
Yeah, on scale.

Waitman Beorn (01:43:35.15)
And even at that point, you know, there were still there's still exhibits in the Ukraine with soldiers from the first invasion, first war, etc. And the passage that you're noting from the acknowledgments is literally I was trying to. I was trying to find information about the Ukrainian guards, because again, that that's an area very openly about the book that needs more detail, you know, about who those guys were and also who the people from Lviv Ukrainian guards were. Anyway.

The Territory of Terror Museum, which is the museum in Lviv that covers the Holocaust, also covers the Stalin period, know, and really, really neat, relatively recent museum, had done some online, they had some stories of people that were tried by the Soviets who had been Ukrainian guards. So was like, I want to find out more. And the person that I've been corresponding with, you know, I was corresponding with him after the invasion. And he wrote back and said,

Sorry, I'm not, I'm not at the museum right now. I'm no longer at the museum. I'm at, I'm at the front at the moment. and of course I wrote back and said, you know, no worries, keep your head down. Like I'll, I'll be fine. you know, and, the, people that work at the, the Institute for the history of the center Europe in the leave center have also been great partners, Sophia Dyack and, trust Nazaruk and trust, trust my to Nenko that worked there.

And they're doing the best they can to, and one of the things that there had been a push to create a much more substantial memorial to Yanovska that's on hold. And even the focus of the Lviv Center, and there's absolutely not a criticism of me at all, is in many ways focused on oral histories of the war.

Fair play. I completely understand that. And so there's a lot of ways in which it's kind of impacted. One of the ones that I can share that is very direct is, again, I'm working on this project that's, again, an offshoot of the book, is this digital reconstruction of the camp. there are some, the camp headquarters building, for example, still exists. It's a multifamily home. And again, it's right next to that streetcar stop.

Waitman Beorn (01:45:54.426)
And, we were thinking about, okay, maybe we'll do this thing called photogrammetry where you take a drone and you fly it around the building and it takes a million different photographs, which then you stitch together and basically creates a really cool, like real 100 % accurate 3d model of it. you know, can't do that because the, the Kleparov train station, which is still the train station right next to the camp is now a military train station and they're using it to offload military supplies.

And so the government's like, no one's flying drones anywhere near this. And also I was working with the Shapon Yami group in Poland, which is a group that goes around trying to find graves. And we had a conversation about, maybe we'll try to try to identify some of the killing sites in the hills behind the camp with an eye to at some point documenting them and commemorating them, et cetera, et cetera. But also, you know, because it's wooded terrain would have had to do sort of an over a kind of aerial.

Doris Bergen (01:46:27.105)
But no.

Waitman Beorn (01:46:54.03)
approach. And again, you can't do that because of the war. can't really, technically speaking, visit Lviv, you know, using any university money because I'm not, you know, it's a war zone, technically, even though Lviv is again, relatively safe, though it's been hit recently with missiles, some of which landed relatively close to the area of the former camp, but not allowed to go there because it's, you know, difficult from an introspective, you know, but

Doris Bergen (01:47:19.422)
University insurance policy won't cover.

Waitman Beorn (01:47:23.672)
So most of the book had really been written before the war. wasn't the writing of the book per se, the research wasn't particularly impacted, but I think there are, there probably are impacts, you know, to be felt. And certainly we know already that the Soviets, the Russians have, you know, destroyed archives that they've come across in other parts of Ukraine that they've, they've conquered. And that's a lot of those KGB archives are valuable sources.

for Holocaust historians, and not to mention all the other ones as well that are being destroyed. So I think if I'm trying to think about what the impact is on the Holocaust, I think it's probably more question of

Doris Bergen (01:47:58.688)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:48:15.534)
just a giant redirection of resources just at the time when, um, at least I'm speaking in the, context of the Lviv, there had been some new and exciting kind of push to beginning to confront the Holocaust and to commemorate both Unovska, but also the Holocaust and Lviv in general. And again, the Lviv center deserves all the credit for they, they, they had been driving a lot of this. Um, but obviously, you know,

priorities are different now, and will remain different, I suspect, even after all of this. And then there's the connection. This is going a little bit farther afield from what I do, but of course, the Russians are bringing up the OUN, the Organization of United Nations Nationalists, and of claiming that all the Ukrainians were Nazi collaborators, which of course is not accurate. But on the other hand, the OUN is also bad.

Doris Bergen (01:49:06.443)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:49:15.423)
And so I suspect there's all kinds of other the memory games are are still afoot, you know, between between everybody in this.

Doris Bergen (01:49:22.154)
Yeah. And maybe a certain, I don't know, window of opportunity for working in our field under certain conditions is gone now, you know? And yeah. So I wanted to end the way that you usually end, because I know you usually ask your guest to recommend a book that they've been reading or that they found especially interesting or important about the Holocaust. And I'm thinking...

Waitman Beorn (01:49:38.647)
Okay.

Doris Bergen (01:49:50.848)
You know, maybe it's your own, since you just reread it last night. What would you bring forward here, you know, as a suggestion for our listeners?

Waitman Beorn (01:49:53.62)
No, no, no, I wouldn't do that. That's, that's, that'd be...

Waitman Beorn (01:50:02.21)
So I'm going to I mean, my challenge is I also don't want to even though all the books that I've read for my guests are amazing, I don't want to recommend one of those because then it's kind of like picking picking favorites. So I'm going to I'm going to do two because I can do that. And the first one is, again, it's really just to me to put an exclamation point because other people have mentioned this book as well. whenever anybody asks me, it's this one. And it's again, it's it's Gittiserenis into that darkness that that is the.

Doris Bergen (01:50:11.551)
Of course.

Doris Bergen (01:50:29.694)
I recommend that too. I love it so much.

Waitman Beorn (01:50:31.934)
If someone was going to ask me who had never read anything about the Holocaust, what's one book I should read? I'm going to say that one because into that darkness is, I mean, the subtitle is always something like, you know, conversations with an SS killer or Franz Dongle or something like that. But really, it's about way more than that. ostensibly, the book, for those of you who haven't read it, it's by an Israeli journalist and it's her conversation. It's based on

conversations with Franz Dengel, who was a euthanasia participant, Nazi T4 program participant, but also the commandant of Sylvia Bohr and Treblinka extermination centers. But the book is, as I said, it's way more about that. It's way more than that. It's about how he gets involved in this, his relationship with his wife and her involvement in this. But also, and again, at the beginning, know,

I mentioned that I wanted to write this integrated history and it might have even been an hour in our episode that you did with me, Doris, about Verma Chaplin's, latest book. But, you know, I talked about this integrated history and then Serenny in many ways wrote that integrated history way back in the whatever 70s because she also she talks about she talks with Stangle and also with his his coworkers, as it were, his wife.

But she also talked with survivors who had been in the camps with him and tells their story and also stories that are not related to Shodango. So stories of the uprising at Sobibor or uprising at Treblinka. And so really as sort of a one stop book, know, Serenny sort of cracked the code that we're all trying to crack again way earlier.

Doris Bergen (01:52:17.558)
And it's so well written, you know, it's so well written. The fact that she's a journalist really, you know, shines through as well, not to insult our guild, but man.

Waitman Beorn (01:52:27.374)
Oh, it's amazing. mean, and as I said, it's a really great one stop shop if you really want to sort of jump into something. I mean, because it talks about, I mean, all different issues, perpetration, gender, wives roles, resistance, legal issues. I mean, there's just so much there. It's just packed full. And the Pope, yeah, the Pope and the rat line because he escapes Europe. Absolutely. It's all of the...

Doris Bergen (01:52:49.288)
and the Pope, the Pope, the Vatican, the Rat Line is all in there.

Waitman Beorn (01:52:56.27)
All those things, just an amazing sort of and it's concise, too. I mean, it's not a sort of doorstop kind of book. So I'll say that the lesser known one that I'm going to mention, I don't know you're familiar with this one. It's a book called Tales of the Master Race by Marcy Hirschman. And this book is again, shout out to the Northwestern Holocaust Education Foundation Summer Institute.

Doris Bergen (01:53:12.074)
Love it.

Waitman Beorn (01:53:25.838)
And Sarah Horowitz, who did a whole thing about literature and introduced me to this book, which I hadn't known about when I was a grad student many, many years ago. Just a fantastic, fantastic book, which is a series of short stories. So it's fiction and you don't get a lot of Holocaust fiction about perpetrators. There's the kindly ones and some other things, but there's very little that's written about perpetrators. This is kind of about perpetrators.

So it's a collection of short stories that in a of a Quentin Tarantino way are all sort of, they're different, but they're all, some of them interact with each other about this fictional town in Germany. And essentially about how various people, some of them we might call perpetrators, Nazis, some people who are against the Nazis are all kind of interacting and experiencing the Third Reich, but also the Holocaust and Nazi Tensata project.

In this little town in Germany and the part that always sticks with me. And I feel like I'm doing reading rainbow here, but that was amazing shows, but it's fine. The part that really sticks with me is there's a part that's sort of written from the perspective of a woman. In a mental institution. Who is sort of cognizant of of the T4 program happening around her and is concerned about it, etc. So I think I think it's an amazing book. It made me really think about.

sort of the perpetrator bystander, ordinary German kind of kind of relationship. And it's something different that, it's not a history book. It's a it's a different way into it. So that's what I'd recommend.

Doris Bergen (01:55:06.28)
You know, I want to add something about that Tales of the Master Race because I too love that book. I've recommended it to so many students, many of whom were inspired to try to write their own short stories based on fiction. And the story that really sticks with me is the man, I think he works in the police office, but he's not a police officer, kind of a simple guy, not well educated. And he gets the job of basically chopping people's heads off in the giddy-

Waitman Beorn (01:55:34.983)
yeah, the guillotine, yeah.

Doris Bergen (01:55:35.891)
in the basement, remember that, of the police office? And that sort of everydayness of the incredible terror and violence of a regime that literally on the surface, he goes home, there's his wife, and whatever, and then underneath, in the basement of that police office, right there in that small town, is that guillotine. Yeah, so these are really

Yeah, hoping our listeners are taking notes. These are both great books and they're also accessible, I feel like, to readers, whether they're, you know, PhD students or professors or undergraduate students, like they're really, really important works.

Waitman Beorn (01:56:25.112)
Yep, absolutely.

Doris Bergen (01:56:27.542)
So thank you, Waidman, for all your thoughts and insights and for your remarkable book.

Waitman Beorn (01:56:35.49)
this is fantastic. Thank you so much. And I guess I'll retake the helm at this point. We've gone a little bit longer than we normally do, but I hope that my audience will give me that as a reward for all the other episodes that I've done. And again, thank you all for listening. Again, we have a reading list. I'll highlight that as well. It's on the show notes on the website.

And it includes all of the books of our guests, including Doris's book on the Wehrmacht chaplains, in addition to their recommendations. So right together, you have both kind of a list of cutting edge scholarship, as well as what those scholars want you to think about reading. So it's a really great resource to check out. So please do that. Please give us a like, give us a subscribe.

Go back, check out it's episode 69, which is Vermaak Chaplains written with our guest or with our guest interviewer Doris Bergen, a great book that deals with what the Chaplains, what the Vermaak Chaplains did regarding the Nazi state and Holocaust. So do check that out as well, along with all the other episodes if you get a chance. And again, Doris, thank you so much. Thank you for volunteering to do this. It's nice to...

to step into the spotlight for a minute. And hopefully everyone hasn't gotten too tired of my voice.

Doris Bergen (01:58:10.24)
Thank you, it's been a pleasure.