Margrit Rosenberg Stenge - Silent Refuge

Margrit Rosenberg Stenges memoir, Silent Refuge, finds its place within the much larger story of Holocaust memory. Arriving in Canada in 1951, she and her husband are two of the close to 40,000 Jews who found post-war refuge in Canada.

The story of the Holocaust is now quite a prominent part of our culture. Impressive institutions devote themselves to Holocaust memory, institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel. Even in Berlin, the city where Germans planned and instigated the horrors of the Holocaust, there is both a Holocaust memorial and a Jewish museum with exhibits that highlight the history of the Holocaust. Narratives of the Holocaust have also become a part of popular culture, starting with Steven Spielbergs 1993 film, Schindlers List.

It was not always so. In the first decades after Nazi Germany collapsed in 1945, Jewish survivors rarely talked about their experiences. This silence was at least partially self-protective, as they tried to stifle recurring nightmares or other symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Additionally, however, survivors often discovered that many people did not want to hear their horrific stories, or, worse yet, did not fully believe them. Escape from Sobibor then became a bbc -produced film in 1987, starring Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer among others. Thomas Blatt assisted in the creation of that film. Finally, in 1997, Blatt was able to publish his own memoir, From the Ashes of Sobibor.

Awareness of the Holocaust did not begin in the 1980s, of course. Newspaper stories appeared even as the Nazi persecution of Jews was taking place. Finally, in the summer of 1945, the story burst upon the pages of newspapers and magazines when photojournalists such as Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White followed Allied troops to camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen. After years of rumours and partially buried press reports on horrible conditions and mass murder, this physical evidence shocked Allied troops. When photojournalists placed their photos in publications such as Life magazine, the images shocked the world. The first of the Nuremberg Trials, held from November 1945 until October 1946, then received considerable news coverage and added to the body of evidence available to observers.

Despite the enormity of this story, awareness of the Holocaust receded after the war. This near disappearance of Holocaust memory was rectified first by historians. The enterprising scholarship of historians such as Raul Hilberg, whose book The Destruction of the European Jews appeared in 1961, and Christopher Browning, who, along with many other critical works, published his path-breaking study, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust in Poland in 1998, created what is now known as the field of Holocaust Studies. Since the beginning of Hilbergs work in the 1950s, and Brownings in the 1970s, the number of Holocaust scholars has grown extensively. While historians followed the lead of Hilberg and Browning, adding to our store of Holocaust memory, scholars in literature, religion, psychology, political science, sociology, art and other fields studied the Holocaust through their own lenses. Together these individuals have built our scholarly foundation for Holocaust memory. There is another essential source for Holocaust memory, however: people like Margrit Rosenberg Stenge who personally remember it. She and many others can tell us about the Holocaust because they are the ones who experienced it.