Are you a professional pillow fighter, or a 95 low-cost time travel agent, or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, Monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. Monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work-related. And with Monday.com, work is just easier. Monday.com, for whatever you run, go to Monday.com to learn more. Welcome to the new books network. Hello. Welcome to the new books in history channel of the new books network podcast. I am your host, Ari Barblett. Today, I'm blessed to be in dialogue with Estelle Tureka. She is professor of Latin American literature and culture in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Today, we will discuss her recently published book, "All a Cost Consciousness and Cold War of Violence in Latin America." Published in Albany by State University of New York Press 2022. Estelle, it's an honor to be in your presence. Thank you, Ari. Thanks so much for having me on the show. To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourself? Where did you grow up or did you study what formative events in your life catalyzed the scholar you'd later become? I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. I came of age in the 1980s during the Reagan years. Those were the years of U.S. involvement in Central America. U.S. support for counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. The D.C. area at the time was a place where many people who were fleeing the Central American wars ended up, especially Salvadorans. They became my classmates, my neighbors. At the time, I had already begun learning Spanish in school. I started learning Spanish as an adolescent. And in that political context of the 1980s, it became a very consequential language and a very consequential learning process for me. I had a chance to see close up the destructive impact of the so-called national security doctrine, the implementation of a doctrine that led Central American governments to target their own citizens. Learning Spanish and learning about Latin America were ways for me to relate to my community, to understand my country and its role in the world. This approach to study was something that my parents supported me in and that they modeled for me. They supported me to approach my studies in this way. I basically haven't stopped studying and learning about Latin America. Since then, I got a BA in Spanish. I got a PhD in comparative literature with a focus on Latin America. And I have the incredible privilege of being able to teach about Latin America and to do so in Spanish at UC Berkeley. So this has really been a lifelong project for me. What inspired you to write this book? What message do you hope to convey to readers? I've been teaching and doing research for many years, several decades at this point. Over the years, at a certain point, I started noticing that I was coming across examples of Latin Americans, both Jews and non-Jews from the area of them using Holocaust memory and Holocaust history to understand their own national histories. And I was really struck by this because it runs counter to my experience growing up in the U.S. and seeing the anxiety of American Jews whenever the Holocaust is used to understand other events. And this anxiety or this fear has crystallized, or did for many years, crystallized in something akin to a taboo against comparing other histories of oppression and persecution to the Jewish experience. In Holocaust studies, we sometimes reference the so-called uniqueness debate that happened in the United States. It's a debate that emerged around a very narrow question, which is, is the Holocaust unique? And the uniqueness theory holds that the Holocaust is an absolutely singular event and that therefore any parallels between the Jewish genocide, between the modern Jewish genocide and other experiences of terrible oppression are historically false. And not only historically false, but also the uniqueness theory holds that if you make connections between the Holocaust and other events that somehow this is harmful to Jews. And this became a very powerful idea in the U.S. and it's had pretty negative effects in my view, because it has severely constrained the ability of non-Jews to make the Holocaust relevant to them. And it's hampered Jews like myself who want to create connections with non-Jews and develop a shared understanding, a shared criticism, a shared critical understanding of how state violence happens, of the nature of racism and antisemitism, of how atrocities and mass killings come about. And so that very sort of stark debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it created a yes/no framework that in my experience led to silencing and to confusion rather than illumination. And so when I started noticing the extent to which in Latin America, the Holocaust was being seen as more like a reflection that Latin Americans could use to understand their own stories. And, of course, they're also concerned there, Jews and non-Jews, about how we remember the Holocaust, and whether it's appropriate to compare other events to it. And I did uncover some really interesting debates about it, especially in Argentina and Guatemala, but the difference with the U.S. is that these are wider, they're more open debates, they don't trigger existential Jewish anxieties to the same degree that they do in the U.S. And so different voices and perspectives have weighed in, they've shaped the discourse rather than being silenced. And the questions end up being less about whether the Holocaust is unique or not, which as a framework is not very useful, to be honest, because most historians agree, all historical events are unique, they are all singular, and yet they all share characteristics with other events. So the discourse isn't, the question isn't so much is the Holocaust unique, but whether it provides a useful reflection on the present or not, and how you would even measure, how you would know what is a useful reflection. So let me just give you an example. If you look at Argentina during the last military dictatorship, that was during the years 1976 to 1983, it involved a brutal counter insurgency campaign. We refer to it as La Guerra Sousia, the Dirty War. It involved death squads, illegal detention centers, torture, widespread torture of anyone suspected of being a dissident. The infamous disappearances when people were kidnapped by government and security forces and never seen again. And at some point during the dictatorship, Argentine started saying, we need a Nuremberg for Argentina. And this was a reference to the Nuremberg tribunals that took place after World War II to prosecute Nazis for war crimes. And what do Argentines mean when they say we will have our own Nuremberg? What they mean is they want to be able to hold the perpetrators of state violence criminally accountable for their actions. And this was quite a novel idea at the time because in Argentina, state violence had become sort of normalized. There wasn't a legal framework to say, this is not okay. So the reference to Nuremberg, this made the Holocaust relevant in Argentina in a new way. It allowed people to reframe their experiences, one of unjust suffering and abuse. And so in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, the Holocaust has functioned as what we might call a distant mirror. And I'm quoting here from Barbara Tuckman. She's a historian who wrote a book with that title about the European Middle Ages. And she said, we can learn about our own times by looking at the past. And what I'm arguing in my book is that in Latin America, the Holocaust is a not so distant mirror. And I think this is a very stimulating proposition. It allows for a more expansive consideration of what the legacies of the Holocaust are in the present day. And personally, it gave me room to breathe intellectually to look at the question from different angles. So, let me come back to the question that you posed. One of the messages that I hope to convey to readers is that the terrible events of the Jewish catastrophe of the Jewish Holocaust resonate in many different ways and to many different people and in many different places that this is, in a sense, desirable because it keeps the memory of it alive and it anchors that history in a living present. And another message I want to convey is that context really matters. And what do I mean by that? I mean that the meaning of the event will be shaped by other events and experiences. It's significance is forged in particular times and places. And so it's vital to understand these times and these places, these contexts, not just because they're intrinsically interesting from a historical perspective, because they really are. But also for ethical reasons so that we can understand the values that specific instances of Holocaust consciousness promote, and so that we can think about the kinds of values that it should promote or that we'd like it to promote. What are the primary themes in your book? What story and stories does your book tell? The main story I want to tell in the book is the story of how and why the Holocaust became significant and relevant in Cold War Latin America. And then in the aftermath of the Cold War in the 90s and into the new millennium when there have been really significant memory debates about how to remember the Cold War. And I build that main overarching story by looking at a few smaller or more specific stories in the book, and I focus on three national scenarios, Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala. And some of my focus is on individual people. So, for instance, in Mexico, I'm very interested in the work of Jose Emilio Bacheco. He was a poet, a novelist, a critic. He was very interested in combating Holocaust denialism in Mexico. And so he promoted the circulation of Holocaust survivor testimonies to a wider reading public in Mexico. And sometimes my focus is on institutions on telling the story of a particular institution. So, for instance, in Argentina, I look pretty deeply into a Jewish organization called the delicación de sociastiones esta elitas archindinas, the delegation of Jewish Argentine organizations, which is known by its acronym DIA. The DIA is the official representative of Jewish community groups. It's a spokesperson for Jews in Argentina. And during the dirty war, it acted in a controversial way, because it didn't support the families of Jews who had been disappeared by the government. Jews during the dictatorship were disproportionately targeted by the military, for example, Jews constitute about 10 to 15% of the estimated 30,000 people who were disappeared. But the Jewish population of Argentina at that time was barely 2% was less than 2%, so quite disproportionate. And as you look at the sources, you see that the Holocaust was an overwhelming point of reference for both the DIA, the organization, when it was defending its actions, and also for its critics who thought it had made terrible mistakes. And then sometimes my focus is on ideas. I really like telling stories about concepts, how they emerge, where they circulate, how they transform over time. And so in the book, I talk quite a bit, for instance, about the concept of testimony, which is obviously hugely important for Holocaust studies, but also has a really rich history in Latin America. And I also talk about the concept of genocide. These are just two examples of concepts that I look at, and they're especially important for understanding, for instance, the history of Guatemala, the experience of Guatemala in the Cold War and post Cold War period. What do perspectives are presented here regarding the UN Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide? As I mentioned, the concept of genocide is obviously of huge importance for how we understand the Holocaust, and it's also become a key term in Latin America to talk about human rights atrocities. The concept of genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin. He was a Polish-Jewish jurist, a legal thinker, and he developed the concept in the 1920s as a legal concept, and the focus is on the murder of a group as a group. And on atrocities that are committed, not just in war, but also in peacetime. And Lemkin noticed how often this kind of violence was occurring, or had occurred, but how there was little or no legal framework to deal with it. And so it's largely due to Lemkin's efforts that the concept was eventually adopted into international law in 1948 with the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. And the Convention recognized the kind of crime against humanity. So the immediate impetus for the codification of genocide as a legal concept was, of course, the Nazi murder of the Jews during World War II, but the legal concept of genocide is not exclusive to the Holocaust. It's interesting about the fact that it came into being in a way as a response to the Holocaust, but is not exclusive to the Holocaust. But the fact is that for many people, the Nazis attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe was, and has sort of remained, the paradigmatic case of genocide. And scholars have pursued a number of really interesting points about this. One, they've discovered that Lemkin, and this is something I build on in the book, Lemkin, when he was developing his ideas, he looked at examples of mass murder from the ancient and early modern world. He was especially interested in the destruction of indigenous peoples of the Americas and so for Latin American is that's already really interesting to think that the seed for the legal concept of genocide might have a Latin American reference to it. Another interesting point is that the original definition of the term that Lemkin had proposed included the mass murder of political groups, such as communists or members of a political party. But when it came time to include this element of the concept of the definition of genocide into the UN Convention, a number of key countries blocked it. And they did so for quite cynical reasons. They wanted to be able to suppress political dissidents in their own countries without facing legal consequences in the international community. The UN Convention describes, and here I'm quoting from it, it describes acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. So you can see it does not describe violence against groups that are defined by their shared political ideology. So why are these two points important, the point about the elimination or the omission of a political idea of genocide, and the fact that Lemkin was really interested in the genocide of indigenous peoples. These are important because the original concept was quite a bit broader than the concept that ended up being codified by the United Nations and that broader understanding includes the mass murder of people for their political affiliations. It includes cases of mass murder that do not look similar to the Nazi genocide of the Jews in terms of how they were carried out, or the amount of time it took to carry them out. For instance, if you look at the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas that happened over decades, and it was as much the result of disease as it was of outright killing. Yet it was still a genocide or one could make a strong case for that. And ever since 1948 people have held on to these broader conceptions of genocide and use the term genocide to call attention to atrocities that don't fit the legal definition of genocide. Why is the Russell tribunal of 1967 noteworthy and important. This is important precisely because it's a key episode in the history of the concept of genocide. The Russell tribunal was a gathering or proceeding that modeled itself on the Nuremberg tribunals. It was held in large part in Stockholm, Sweden, and its purpose was to determine whether the actions of the United States in Vietnam constituted genocide. The Russell tribunal was convened by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and it brought together a very distinguished group of philosophers and political figures from around the world, including Latin Americans, such as former President, former Mexican President Lassaro Garbenas. So most of the participants in the Russell tribunal viewed the Vietnam War as a national liberation struggle, and they found that yes, this movement was being met with genocidal force by the US. They felt that for the same reasons the world had condemned the actions of the Nazis against the Jews, or for the same reasons the world should have condemned the actions of the Nazis against the Jews. So to it should condemn the actions of the United States against the Vietnamese. Now obviously this finding did not have any legal force on the tribunal was not a recognized legal entity, but it had tremendous moral force and it inspired a number of other tribunals on other human rights situations, human rights abuses. The tribunal on Latin American human rights violations in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. There was a tribunal on indigenous peoples of the Americas. There were other tribunals on Guatemala, on Palestine, many other situations, and the Russell tribunal anticipated what more and more scholars are now saying, namely, we can't let the narrow legal definition of genocide obscure the moral force of the concept. I really highly recommend work by scholars such as A. Dirk Moses, Daniel Firestein, and Linda Kinsler, who've written on these questions. The fact that the moral force of the concept is in a way more powerful and broader than the legal definition of genocide and you can see this really all over Latin America people call attention to crimes against humanity. That they consider to be genocidal, but that don't fit the legal meaning of the term. And you describe the origins and evolution of the term Maya Holocaust. Maya Holocaust. This is one of the fascinating stories that I encountered when I was researching this book and it's directly related to the concept of genocide that we were just discussing. Let me start first by describing a little bit about the Guatemalan Civil War. This was a long war. It lasted 36 years from 1960 to 1996. It started as a direct result of a CIA backed military coup against the democratic government of Hakobo Arbenz, the Guatemalan president at the time. And that coup was followed by years of military repression against political opponents. And so the military government made it impossible to engage in meaningful political dissent. And that led to the formation of armed groups who rebelled against the government. The civil war that resulted from this affected hundreds of thousands of people in Guatemala from all walks of life. One of the groups that was most severely affected were indigenous Mayan villagers who lived in the highlands of Guatemala. And in the early 1980s, the Guatemalan army decided that the best way to combat guerrilla rebels was with a scorched earth campaign. That means you just sort of raise the land and you target everyone and everything that's living in a certain part of the country, wherever they thought guerrilla rebels might be or might one day be. And the military was particularly worried about indigenous Mayans supporting the guerrillas. And in fact, it's true that many Mayans were members of the armed rebel groups. But what happened is that the military perceived all Mayans as a threat, regardless of whether they were involved in an armed group or not. And it thought that they were a threat. It used a sort of racist logic. It thought that they were a threat because, well, they might provide food and other forms of material support for the guerrillas. But also because the military thought there were some aspects of Mayan culture that sort of predisposed them to supporting the guerrillas. They made statements about Mayan culture, Mayan ethnicity. And so the military embarked on a campaign of massacres against entire Mayan villages. They killed everyone, women, men, children, the elderly. So it's estimated that in that entire 36 year war, at least 200,000 people were killed. And that's not including people who were disappeared, people who were displaced. But of the 200,000 confirmed deaths, 83% of them were Mayas. And that scorched earth campaign against the Mayas has been widely condemned as genocidal. And so how do we get from that to the term Maya Holocaust? The term first appeared in print in the early 1990s. Thanks to the work of a Maya scholar and activist named Demetrio Pojtikuhil. And he published a book about Maya self-determination. And he dedicated it to all those who had perished in the third Maya Holocaust. That was his term. So this is really quite interesting. He wrote the dedication, Cocte wrote the dedication in a Maya language, Cáchical. And he translated the Cáchical word for killing with the word Olokaoisto Holocaust. So this was clearly a very conscious choice on his part to use this word. And I was curious why choose the word Holocaust when he could have used the word genocide. Like I said, that was already a term that people were using to talk about the atrocities that the Guatemalan army was committing. And I spoke to Cocteikuhil when I was researching the book, and it became clear that he thought of these two words as very closely connected, almost synonyms. And that makes complete sense for the reasons that we talked about before, which is that the Jewish genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, was considered for so many years the paradigmatic case of genocide, not just an instance of it, but the case. And not just a paradigmatic case, but also the case on which everyone practically agrees. So the term Holocaust, you know, notwithstanding the significance of Holocaust denialism, the term Holocaust is sort of instantly recognizable as a universal symbol for evil. And so I think that Cocteikuhil, when he chose to talk about the third Maya Holocaust, he wanted to show that the Maya genocide was similarly deserving of condemnation. But let me add one final point about this. Cocteikuhil specifically mentioned a third Maya Holocaust, and that's another very significant gesture on his part because it establishes a historical pattern of genocide across the centuries. Why third? So for the Mayas, the first Maya Holocaust was the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, which was an absolutely devastating event. The second Maya Holocaust was the implantation of a commodity export economy in 19th century Guatemala, which really decimated Mayan communities because it completely undermined their agricultural way of life. So then the third Maya Holocaust of the 1980s is it's portrayed as a repetition of terrible events that the Mayas have managed to survive over the generations. Can you tell us about Rico Bertha, Menchu, and the Stole Menchu case? What is the significance of this case? Your listeners may already be familiar with the story of Rico Bertha Menchu. She is a Maya Quiche activist and author from Guatemala. She and her family were subsistence farmers who were inspired by liberation theology, that is they and other liberation theologists developed a practice of reading the New Testament, the Christian Bible, that linked the actions of Jesus on behalf of the poor to their own struggle for dignity as farmers. Her father was one of the founders of a peasant union that's a union of subsistence farmers that advocated for land justice. Menchu herself was also an organizer, a rural organizer and a catechist. She traveled and taught people about this approach to the Bible. And other members of her family joined armed rebel groups and all of them became targets of government repression. Two of them, her mother and her brother were tortured and killed by the military. Menchu, like I said, was an important teacher. She was herself a leader. She had to go into hiding to escape death and she managed to escape Guatemala. And she wanted to spread the word to the international community about the human rights abuses that were happening. And eventually she published a famous testimonial account about her experiences in 1983. And she became even more famous in 1992 when she received the Nobel Peace Prize. And 1992, of course, was a very symbolic year because it marked 500 years since Columbus had arrived. And the Americas and Menchu was awarded the prize in a way in recognition as a kind of symbolic reparation for that. So David Stolle enters the picture a couple of decades after she had published her book. He is an American anthropologist and he began to publicly question the facts of her testimony. He found some factual inconsistencies in her book. For instance, she says that her brother was killed by the army by being burned alive. But in fact, her brother was killed by the army by being shot. Stolle also says that Menchu was a member of a rebel group, but that she did not state this openly in her memoir, which is true. But what he took from this is that she is less than honest and he used these inconsistencies and these emissions to call her whole account into question. That is to say, this person is lying, she's manipulating the truth, you can't trust anything she says. And this statement was hugely controversial because it immediately gave ammunition to genocide denialists in Guatemala. A lot of Guatemalans argue that the massacres of indigenous people were not genocide, that they were collateral damage, and they deny the extent of the violence. So why is this controversy between David Stolle and Rigoberta Menchu important for my work? It's important because people came to Menchu's defense by saying that for Stolle to use the testimony of a victim or victim witness like Menchu to question whether the Guatemalan genocide really happened. That's like using the testimony of Holocaust witnesses and Holocaust survivors to question whether the Holocaust really happened. The controversy brought into relief a lot of thorny issues about the relative weight, the truth value of survivor testimony, and these are issues that have concerned Holocaust scholars for decades. A classic example of this concern is discussed by psychologist Dory Laub, who worked with many Holocaust survivors in the 1980s and was one of the founders of the fortune-off video archive housed at Yale University, which is a collection of video testimony by Holocaust survivors. And he talks about an Auschwitz survivor who was a prisoner who witnessed the Auschwitz uprising in 1944. At one point, the prisoners attempted to destroy the crematoria, and she talks about sort of her joy at seeing four crematoria chimneys burst into flame when they were exploded. And Laub says this is a really difficult statement to deal with because historians know that only one crematoria chimney was exploded. And so what do we do with her testimony? It really brings up sort of some fundamental questions about the kind of truth that a Holocaust victim can testify to. So do we hold their testimony to legal standards? Do we hold it to journalistic standards? Do we hold it to academic standards, scholarly standards of truth? Or do we understand it from a more psychological and political perspective and even a moral perspective, which is what Laub, Dory Laub, asks us to do, and which is what men choose defenders asked us to do when they were responding to Stole's accusations. They said, we should read men choose testimony the way Laub reads the Auschwitz survivors testimony. It testifies to the victim's ability and to their right to tell their own story. And this was really a very important statement to make for about Ryboberta Minshu because she is a Maya woman. And for centuries, the Maya perspective on history has been silenced and denied. So I've found this just so fascinating that the experience that scholars had in grappling with the kinds of truth claims that Holocaust survivor testimony offers that they would use that to illuminate this very different situation of a Latin American activist. Can you comment on the show of foundations work and activities in Latin America? This is another fascinating story that that I wanted to understand better in my book. The Show of Foundation was founded in 1994 by director Steven Spielberg. It was coming in the wake of the success of the movie Schindler's List, which had aired in 1993, a hugely successful Holocaust movie, kind of a game changer in terms of popular representations of the Holocaust. The original mission of the Show of Foundation was to produce audio visual testimony by as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible and it collected thousands of video testimonies from all over the world. And this includes video testimonies by Holocaust survivors in Latin America. So you can find a couple thousand testimonies that were given in Spanish and Portuguese. The Show of Foundation's Visual History Archive and these are stories about Holocaust experiences by people who ended up in Latin America. And this impetus Spielberg's Show of Foundation sort of impetus, it generated just intense activity in gathering Holocaust testimonies. It really inspired a lot of other testimonial projects. A few years after it may be about 10, 15 years ago now, the Show of Foundation became interested in supporting the survivors of other genocides. And it wanted to record testimonies or to support to house the existing testimonies by survivors, for example, the Armenian genocide, or the Cambodian genocide. As part of this expansion, it supported a Guatemalan organization that collects Maya testimonies about the Guatemalan Guatemalan genocide. And this organization is the forensic anthropology foundation of Guatemala, which as its name suggests does a lot of forensic work, meaning that it looks into it searches for and exumes and analyzes mass graves, where the massacres, the massacre victims were, were put. And so they work with witnesses to the massacres with some of the few survivors of the massacres and their aim is to uncover these graves, to analyze the forensic evidence to present this evidence in cases against Guatemalan perpetrators. And then also very symbolically to rebury these remains in a much more appropriate way. And at a certain point this foundation wanted to branch out to tell other parts of the story, not just the forensic story, but also the more personal story about the victims and about the survivors. And so they partnered with the Show of Foundation, which really supported them technical support and other kinds of support. And there are now over 500 testimonies by Guatemalan survivors, some of them are in Spanish, some of them are in Maya languages like Kiche, they're housed at the Show of Foundation on its website, not all of them are available. Yet, they need to be processed, and they are modeled on Holocaust testimonies. So, this is a really interesting case of the transposition of a kind of Holocaust approach to memory, but also one that's been adapted to local circumstances. You can sort of compare the way Guatemalan survivors talk about the Holocaust, sorry about the genocide in their video testimonies and you can see how the producers of these testimonies are following some of the scripts that were developed to talk to Holocaust survivors, but they've also made made important changes, interesting changes. What does your research teach us about Holocaust memory in Mexico? There's so much more research that we need to do about Holocaust memory in Mexico. And, honestly, we're really fortunate that there are more scholars who are delving, delving further into this topic. And since my book appeared, I've seen several key articles about it, including research about the experience of Holocaust survivors in Mexico right after the war. So we estimate that less than 2000 Jews were able to gain entry to Mexico when they were escaping Nazism, and then an even smaller number of Holocaust survivors arrived after the war. But what's interesting is there was a thriving anti-fascist movement in Mexico during the war. There were a lot of German exiles who spent the war in Mexico. They published, they created groups and anti-fascist groups. In fact, one of the earliest visual depictions of the final solution, an artistic rendering circulated in Mexico. This was a print of the Catacard transports that was done by a famous Mexican print artist, Leopoldo Mendez, and it appeared in 1942. It's really strikingly early. So my research on Mexico focuses on this later period, the post-war period, the Cold War, and especially the late 1960s and the 1970s. And what I discovered was that Jewish Holocaust memory was not very visible in the public eye in that period in Mexico. Since then it's become much more visible. Now there is a large and important Holocaust Museum, for instance, but back then not so much. And I found a few published and self published memoirs by Holocaust survivors who were living in Mexico, published in Spanish. One of these is by a really interesting woman, Dunia Wasserstem. She gave evidence at the so-called Auschwitz trials. These were the Frankfurt trials held in Frankfurt, Germany in the mid 1960s to prosecute Nazi camp officials. She was living in Mexico when she gave that testimony and she founded a small organization for Holocaust survivors in Mexico. And she was also one of the founders of the first Holocaust Museum there, the Tuvi Maisel Museum, which is a small museum that again did not gather a lot of public attention, unlike this more recent and larger museum that opened a few years ago. What I focus on in my research was really more the importance of Holocaust memory for non Jewish writers in Mexico. I already mentioned the work of Jose Emilio Pacheco, he wrote an incredible novel about the Holocaust, a really difficult and yet still at times very moving and beautiful novel that he constructed from first hand accounts of the extermination, including Wasserstrum's account. The novel is called Moridace Lejosuits translated as you will die in a distant land, I highly recommend it to your listeners. Pacheco also published a lot of articles about Holocaust denialism, he wanted to educate the Mexican public about it. So in the book really sort of delves into his activities. And I also look really closely at the work of Dununa Mercado, who was an Argentine writer, and how did she end up in Mexico, she and many other Argentine political dissidents escaped to Mexico as political exiles Mexico gave refuge to several thousand Argentines who were fleeing for their lives, they were escaping death squads and another repression. And once she was in Mexico, Dununa Mercado found and interviewed a small group of Holocaust survivors and she published her interviews in the paper. And this experience became really formative for her own thinking, her thinking about exile, her thinking about political solidarity, about why it's so important to give and to share testimony about these kinds of experiences. And I just found her work really inspiring. And both Pacheco and Mercado found that Holocaust memory could be a kind of model for the memory that they thought needed to be constructed in Latin America about the dirty war. They wanted to break through the censorship about state violence that was happening in Argentina, but also in Mexico. Mexico had its own dirty war sort of had fewer victims than the one in Argentina, but nevertheless, quite, quite terrible events. And both Jose Milo Pacheco and Dununa Mercado thought that Holocaust survivor testimony could help Latin Americans give testimony about their own, their own experiences. Ruiz Sarah Laskier de Ruiz. Sarah Ruiz was an Auschwitz survivor. She moved to Argentina after the war with her husband who was also a survivor of Auschwitz. She enters into the stories that I tell in this book because her son Daniel Ruiz was one of the people who was disappeared during the military dictatorship during the the dirty war. And this happened to several Holocaust survivors in Argentina is they came to this place that seemed like a haven where they could restart their lives. And instead this horrific thing happened to them, which is that the military junta took their children, tortured, killed them, and, and disappeared them They were never seen again. So, for Sarah Ruiz and for others like her, these two events, the Holocaust and the dirty war in Argentina, the two events were absolutely intertwined. They joined the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in the 1970s. This was a famous human rights group that was formed by the mothers of the disappeared and they demonstrated every week in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship that is during that was quite dangerous to express any kind of dissidents. They demonstrated with pictures of the children that had been kidnapped by the military and they inspired a lot of others to protest the dictatorship and there was a group of Jewish mothers who integrated into the the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Sarah Ruiz also protested against the dia against the Jewish leadership in Argentina, because it didn't help her locate her son. Her publicizes case and it's, it's very ironic. She received more support. She and other Jewish Madres received more support from the German embassy in Argentina than she did from the Jewish community, the official Jewish community in Argentina. Your listeners are interested, they can find Sarah Ruiz's video testimony in the Show of Foundations visual history archive and she talks there, both about her experience in Auschwitz and in Europe. And also about her son's disappearance in 1977. And Sarah was passed away in January 2024, but she she had a real impact. Yeah, cool. Timmerman is another figure from from this Argentine scenario. He was a newspaper editor, very well respected his newspaper was a sort of center, center politically of the center newspaper called lopignon. He was Jewish, a Zionist. He initially supported the military coup, supported the military flint, but eventually he started to find that their tactics were were wrong. And so he began publishing in his paper lists of the disappeared that human rights groups would provide him. And this got him in trouble with the hunt and so he was detained, he was not disappeared, but he was illegally detained and because he was a newspaper editor, he was, he had, he was one of the more famous people who was, who became a political prisoner. And his detention garnered a lot of international attention. And eventually thanks to the efforts of US officials and to some lobbying within Argentina, he was released and he was immediately stripped of his Argentine citizenship by the government and deported. And he ended up in Israel, and he wrote a memoir, famous testimony called prisoner without a name cell without a number. And it came out in 1982 so this was still during the dictatorship and it came out first in English and so it reached a fairly wide international audience and why is he such an important figure and he. In addition to sort of denouncing and condemning the military quanta, he was really angry at the Jewish leadership in Argentina and he began to weave in a very difficult accusation, saying that the Jewish leadership were like the Yudunreta, the Yudunreta, which were the Jewish councils of occupied Poland, and other Nazi territories and the Nazis would appoint Jewish leaders to oversee the ghettos and to participate to help with some elements of the final solution. The, the legacy of these Jewish councils is is hugely controversial, obviously, because they were complicit, they were held to be complicit by many Jews. At the same time, they thought that they were trying to mitigate some of the worst forms of violence. And Timmerman basically said, we had something like a Holocaust in Argentina and our leadership repeated all of the mistakes of the Jewish councils, and it was just a very direct and harsh accusation and quite hyperbolic and it generated tremendous controversy within Argentina. As I said, he was an internationally recognized person and so his claims were echoed they were amplified there were articles in the New York Times about this. There were hearings in the US Congress that used his work. And so he really injected a kind of Holocaust frame into into our understanding of what was happening in Argentina and generated tremendous debate about how anti-Semitic was the military junta they were anti-Semitic. Did they target Jews as Jews for being Jews, or did they target Jews because they thought they were dissidents. It was a very complex situation and Timmerman was a very polemical and polarizing figure and the debates about this are just just really fascinating and, and, and difficult. When you describe the new wave of presentia publication in Argentina. Was a Jewish newspaper, it began publishing in 1977 that's a key date this was full on during the dictatorship and Argentina had so many really interesting Jewish papers some of them were published in Spanish, some of them were published in Yiddish. There were kinds of ideologies represented right wing center left wing all different kinds of left wing. But many of them faced censorship during the dictatorship and what I put a sensea appeared at a time when there were very few other Jewish newspapers that were able to publish during the dictatorship. It did not think of itself as a particularly ideological publication. In fact, it was quite pluralist. A lot of people participated from from across the ideological spectrum. And one of the things I did for my, my research for this book was to read every single issue of this newspaper and it was so fascinating. You can see the way that what the presentia tried to cover the dictatorship, the way it was covering things happening in the Middle East and in other countries the way it was a voice for Jewish art and literature for Jewish intellectuals. But also the way it became more and more oriented towards a human rights approach. It made alliances with the mothers of the Plasadimayo, its editor Herman Schiller became a voice for Jewish human rights. He was one of the founders of the Jewish movement for human rights. He covered the Khakobur Timmerman case extensively. His paper was critical of the dia. And I just got so much learned so much from reading it it was a real snapshot of what was happening to the Jewish community during this time. And just as a note for your listeners, I recommend this kind of exercise so much to read primary sources from the time in question. And you just get a really rich and textured view of what was happening at the time. It's a real way to understand context. What is your books contribution to Holocaust Studies? Right, that's, that's a great question. That's the question that every scholar has to grapple with. So, in a way, it's a very basic, I have a very basic answer, which is that I want to show that Latin America is a place for thinking about the Holocaust. I want to, in a way, put it on the map of Holocaust studies. Many scholars of the Holocaust rightly focus their attention on the scenes where the Holocaust happened, you know, it's, it's a field of scholarship that's very focused on Europe and that makes total sense. But we also want to know about where Holocaust refugees escaped to. We want to know where Holocaust survivors emigrated to. We want to know how they remade their lives. We want to know how people in other countries were tracking what was happening in Europe, how they remember those events. Latin America has held a kind of odd place in Holocaust studies, historically, because it's where Nazis went after the war. So many high ranking Nazi criminals escaped to Latin America, especially Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, some ended up in Chile, some in Mexico. And they were able to hide out there quite successfully for years and years and so it's kind of given us this idea of Latin America as a haven for for Nazi war criminals. But there's so much more to the story than that, so much more to learn about. And that's what I hope my book contributes to is, is directing readers to that, that wider history, and especially to readers who read in English. There are there is scholarship more and more scholarship about this happening in Latin America by scholars who write in Spanish and Portuguese. And I hope that by talking about this for an English language audience I can really expand our understanding of Holocaust studies. As we bring today's dialogue to a close. Can you tell us about where your time and attention have gone since completing this work. So to be honest, I had thought that I would go in another direction after finishing this book. I've always been really interested in and have published other work on on the Andes on Mexico and specifically on indigenous literature. But I found that I've continued to work on this. I'm still very much involved in research on Holocaust memory in Latin America. I've wanted to develop a better understanding of it in the countries that I was not able to talk about in the book, especially Peru and Ecuador. I've been learning more about the experience of Holocaust survivors in those countries and of Holocaust refugees. So I still find this to be a fascinating topic. It's a really hard topic, a really heavy topic, but it's one that has continued to spark my interest and that I've continued to think and write about. I'm so grateful. I'm so proud of you. And I'm so honored to have had the privilege of your attention today during the course of this conversation. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, Ari. It was a real pleasure to speak with you. As we end today. I'm signing office, Ari barbell at your host on the new books and history channel of the new books network podcast today I've been in dialogue with Estelle Tareka. She is professor of Latin American literature and culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. We have been in dialogue regarding her recently published book, Holocaust consciousness and cold war violence in Latin America, published in Albany by State University of New York press 2022. Thank you. [Music] [Music]
