The Justice

Media Credit: Julian Agin-Liebes University of California Los Angeles history professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Friedlander gives his perspective on the importance of having an integrated history of the Holocaust.

Among the vestiges of the Holocaust, one particular photograph stands out to the University of California Los Angeles Prof. Saul Friedlander. At first glance, the photograph depicts an ordinary scene: David Moffie receiving his doctorate in medicine at the University of Amsterdam Sept. 18, 1942. Yet upon closer inspection, one may notice a palm-sized Jewish star with the word Jooh inscribed on Moffie's sleeve.

What makes this photograph intriguing is that at the date that it was taken, a German decree had banned the enrollment of Jewish students in Dutch universities. The minor detail in this photograph tells a story absent from solely studying German records. It tells a story of the interaction among German administrative measures, Dutch institutions, individual choice and, at the center of it all, the fate of the Jewish individual, explained Friedlander in a presentation March 16.

Friedlander, who lived through the Holocaust, used the detailed description of the photograph to open a broader talk, "Voices of the Victims: Challenges of an Integrated History of the Holocaust." In a rich, storytelling manner, Friedlander argued for an integrated history of the Holocaust that isn't limited to the factual accounts of history books but also includes visceral, personal accounts from a multitude of perspectives.

Friedlander's speech was given in honor of the first chair of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department, Simon Rawidowicz, as the "The 46th Simon Rawidowicz Memorial Lecture." The lecture was sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies and the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department.

Friedlander was born in Prague to German-speaking Jewish parents and moved to France during the years of Nazi occupation. There, Friedlander was forced to hide in a Catholic boarding school. His parents soon attempted to flee to Switzerland but were arrested by Germans and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1948, Friedlander moved to Israel and joined the Israeli army. After, he studied political science in Paris and eventually earned a Ph.D. at the Graduate Institution of International Studies at Geneva. He currently is a history professor at UCLA and was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his work The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

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