Archive.fm

New Books in History

Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust. Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of the SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising. This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Broadcast on:
27 Sep 2024
Audio Format:
other

Waitman Wade Beorn's book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) tells for the first time the history of the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. Located in a city with the third-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, Janowska remains one of the least-known sites of the Holocaust, despite being one of the deadliest. Simultaneously a prison, a slave labor camp, a transit camp to the gas chambers, and an extermination site, this hybrid camp played a complex role in the Holocaust.

Based on extensive archival research, Between the Wires explores the evolution and the connection to Lviv of this rare urban camp. Waitman Wade Beorn reveals the exceptional brutality of the SS staff alongside an almost unimaginable will to survive among prisoners facing horrendous suffering, whose resistance included an armed uprising. This integrated chronicle of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders follows the history of the camp into the postwar era, including attempts to bring its criminals to justice

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

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. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify. The global commerce platform that supercharges your selling, wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/tech. I'll lowercase. That's Shopify.com/tech. Ford Profense Simple offers flexible financing solutions for all kinds of businesses. Whether you're an electrician, or run an organic farm. Because we know that your business demands financing that works when you need it. Like when your landscaping company lands a new account. Wherever you see your business headed, Ford Profense Simple can help you pursue it with financing solutions today. Get started at FordPro.com/financing. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi, and welcome to New Books and Genocide Studies, part of the New Books Network of Podcasts. My name is Keller McFall from Newman University, and I'm a host on the channel. Today, I'm thrilled to be talking with Waitman Borne, author of the terrific new book, Between the Wires, the UNESCO Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv. Waitman, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us in New Books and Genocide Studies. Thanks for having me. Yeah, Waitman, you and I have known each other for a while, and you've been on the show a couple of times, but it's been a while the audience might have heard you talk. Why don't we start by asking you to just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became a historian and how you became interested in mass violence. Sure, so I came to academia in kind of a security route, I suppose. I graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point, and so I did five years in the military before I got out and decided that I wanted to go to graduate school and study history. I've always been interested in history, my family, my parents were the ones that sort of relentlessly read every little thing in a museum when we went to visit museums and, and I picked up on that as well. And the Holocaust, as a topic, because it presents such challenges to sort of our understanding of why people do these things to each other. And so I ended up at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for graduate school. Very, very fortunate to work with the great Christopher Browning, who obviously was a fantastic person to have as a mentor and advisor still is. And so then I embarked on an academic career, and that was a couple different institutions as well as at the Virginia Holocaust Museum and Richmond for years as a director there. But then ended up moving here to the UK, where I'm also a professor of history at Northumbra University. And yes, I've been focusing, I've been focused on, I would say, looking at the lower levels of the Holocaust in most of my work. My first book was about the German Army, but really looking at what individual soldiers did and how they became involved in genocide. My first book was different. It was, it was more of a overview of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, or general audience, but then this one as well as is looking at the, at the lower levels of personalities individuals. And then how they navigate the Holocaust, both from the sort of resistance side as well as the perpetrator side. So yeah, that's kind of a brief overview, I suppose, of to how I got to where I am. I can come and my wife, whenever she tells us people about our travels, she will point out she brings a book with her whenever we go to a museum because she can count on being out hours before I am. That's right. Yep. Occupational hazard. So what made you get interested in the enoughs? I can't. So it's a story that probably some of the academic folks listening to this can relate to when I was doing the first book that I just mentioned. I had kind of a side file of things that were interesting but didn't fit into that book, you know, maybe look into these things later for another project. And one of the things was a German army motor pool unit so a unit that was responsible for maintaining repairing German army vehicles. It was based in Lviv. And the reason it had showed up is there was an investigation into its personnel related to Holocaust that took that was stored in the Ludwigsburg archive of the archive of the central office for the investigation of Nazi violent crime. And I sort of put it to the side because it wasn't, it didn't fit in the book on Belarus, but it was interesting. I circled back to it I thought maybe I'll, you know, write a book about this. And it turned out that the German army motor pool unit have been using slave labor Jewish slave labor from this place called UNESCO, which I'd never heard of. And thank God I pursued that instead of the more boring German army motor pool thing because when I came across you know, I don't say discovered because I really hate the, you know, the sort of rush to popular history books of like the never before told story, et cetera, et cetera, you know, obviously people. Lots of people have known about enough to get some level, but when I came across it, I found it just to be a really, really interesting place. And while as we'll probably talk about, it's not an unknown place I discovered it's not because I'm brilliant or anything but I discovered that no one had written a monograph on it. There literally was almost there's practically nothing in English written about it. And some great German historians, Dieter Poel and Thomas sun cooler have written about it in sort of book chapter form in various German publications, but nobody really looked at it from a deep dive in a sort of scholarly way. And so that's how I sort of became interested in this particular topic and I sort of ran with it. And it just it, I kept finding more and more things, which is why this took 10 years to finally finish. I was going to say you were generous enough to come to Newman and present, I think, a very early version of a chapter of this, maybe 10 years ago. So, yeah, it's, it's been a while because I, you know, my, my Kryptonite as a, as a scholar is being able to tell myself when it's time to stop researching and start writing. And so I just, you know, I kept finding things since I kept, I kept pulling threads rather than probably stopping and sort of writing the book. A good practical lesson for graduate students in the audience. And that's it. This is a camp near the town of Lviv. So, can you introduce the book by saying a little bit about Lviv and its history and the history of Jewish, the Jewish community there. Sure. So, I mean, first of all, the campus in the city of Lviv, you know, it is 20 minutes from downtown walking. And you can take the streetcar from the center of town and it stopped. There's literally a streetcar stop outside the building that used to be the headquarters of the camp. And Lviv is a really interesting place. Historically, you know, we can say Lviv for Ukraine or Lemberg will evolve or evolve depending on whether you're a Russian speaker Polish speaker or German speaker. Because all of those different, well, German, in this case, in sense of Austrian, but all of those nation states slash ethnicities have a really long and complex history in the city. You know, it's for a certain period of time. It was kind of in the, in the sphere of Kevin Rus. Then later on, it's part of sort of the the earth Poland, then it's part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And then it, you know, after the second of the First World War, it's part of Poland. And, you know, it's, it's an interesting place because there were all these ethnicities of which Jews were one very prominent one. That are, in some sense, competing for recognition or power, depending on who is in charge. So when the Austrians were in charge, you know, you sort of had Austrian bureaucrats, but then they preferred Polish sort of local people to work. And then, you know, under the Soviets, the Poles were certainly not the preferred group. It was more the Ukrainians, likewise under the Nazis. And the Jewish population, there was 160,000 Jews in Lviv at the beginning of the Second World War. So, and of course, Lviv was the capital of the region of Galicia, which is a region of Poland with a very long and rich, diverse Jewish history as well. And the Jews of Lviv, in terms of sort of the political situation, they were always caught in the middle between Poles and Ukrainians, you know, sort of vying for power. Each one of those sides would kind of want to co-op the Jews to sort of support one side or the other. And, you know, the Jews were absolutely no win situation there because if they sided with one, then the other would hate them. But then both sides hated them for not siding with either of them. So, you know, it was a difficult situation at times, but also not completely doom and gloom. You know, the Jewish community in Lviv, obviously, you know, held all the different diverse elements of a Jewish community. You know, there were Orthodox, highly observant religious Jews, there were multitude of synagogues and prayer houses. But there's also a thriving sort of secular Jewish life, a very famous Yiddish theater, very, very famous, you know, academics, because there's a university in the city as well. So, a really, really flourishing community that contributed sort of the, to the political, social and cultural life of the city in lots of different ways. So what, what lenses or lessons or frames did the Jewish inhabitants of Lviv bring from that history that might shape their response to Nazi presence or persecution? That's a great question. I think, and this is a bit larger. You know, the Jews of Eastern Europe were just, I think, and of Europe in general were fundamentally unprepared for what the Nazis were ultimately trying to do. And they'd obviously the Jewish communities have obviously experienced persecution in the past, they experienced mass atrocities in the past, programs, these kinds of things. But the sort of set of responses and tactics to deal with those situations were fundamentally incompatible with, you know, resisting what the Nazis were ultimately choosing to do. Because in these situations in the past, you know, the Jewish communities sort of general thought was, well, you know, this will blow over eventually things will go back to normal and the arc, sort of the arc of Jewish non Jewish relations was, you know, in the grand scheme of things getting better and better over time. Jews are getting more and more rights, more and more quality. And so the idea was, look, we'll sort of batten down the hatches. We'll oftentimes in the middle of the period, we'll sort of circle ourselves, circle our wagons as it were, defend ourselves as best we can, but this is not going to be something that's long term. And it's not something that is systemically aimed at, you know, eradicating Jews. And even even up to the experience of collision Jews and Jews in Eastern Europe during the First World War, where the Germans occupy, they're very paternalistic, you know, in a lot of ways and sort of racist in that sense. But they're absolutely not intending to to murder Jews or even destroy Jewish life. In fact, you know, one of the things that this sort of the idea is to bring culture to Eastern Europe. And again, that's, that's, that's as its own deep racisms and, and as I say paternalistic but you know they're doing things like conserving wooden synagogues and things as, as elements of sort of culture. So again, you know, many Jews in their memoirs or in their testimonies will talk about, you know, we, we've experienced the Germans in the First World War and we weren't in the, in the initial moments, you know, 39 or so we weren't worried about the German so much because or as much, based on our experiences. But as we'll see, you know, that it rapidly becomes clear that this is going to be different occupation. And, and those techniques of survival don't work, but it takes a long time. It's difficult, right, to approach the unknown. I think a lot of times we make the mistake of looking at Jewish responses to German occupation in the Holocaust, you know, with the knowledge of the Holocaust coming. And, you know, it's, that's, that's not helpful because these are people that are living in the event. And, you know, making a decision about what to do with your entire family, and whether to uproot your entire family and move from one place the other or, you know, take a variety of different risks involved in resisting it that those those decisions play a lot differently when you have no knowledge of what's coming. And that's one of the hardest things I have students to get students to understand as the history has lived forward, rather than backwards. You, you do a lot with space and with geography and with the way in which various spaces in the city relate. And so could you say something about, I was thinking about Lviv and its, its surrounding region spatially help us understand the decision to make the camp and the role of the camp will play. Yeah, one of the things that I've been really inspired since, gosh, I want to say 2007 when I was still a graduate student and I was invited to take part in this collaborative workshop at the United States Holocaust Museum on, on space and geography Holocaust, along with some, some really great scholars of the Holocaust and, and geography, Paul Jaskott and Noles, Greta Giadano, Tim Cole, some some folks that really sort of begin to this and I was just a sort of wide I graduate student who hadn't really thought about the world in terms of space and place. And it's something that, you know, particularly as I became sort of a professor, it was doing this, this work really in depth, I really wanted to include that kind of analysis and kind of understanding of the world. And this is the first book that I really did that sort of intentionally and, and, and consciously, because I think there are really lots of important elements of a spatial understanding that can help us to parse out some of the sometimes Byzantine and complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which the Holocaust takes place. And so, you know, one of the things is scale right what scale are we looking at the event and so one of the things I've tried to do with the book is to place enough to get a variety of different scales. And throughout the book sort of be being checking back in with here's what's happening at the sort of national continental scale with the Nazi state. Here's what's happening in the general government which is the area of occupied Poland and then here's what's happening in the city of Lviv and in the camp itself and, and how are these things interacting with each other and playing with each other. You know, at the, at the micro level as well as at the regional because of course, the Lviv is becomes the, the capital city of the district Galizi, which is the last district added to the general government in 1941 after the Soviets invade. So it has a particularly important position there. But it's also the city itself is like 60 miles from the Bells determination center. And so the situation of you know, at a rail crossroads literally, you know, 300 yards from a, a freight railway station is important. But those, those rail networks also connect lots of other smaller cities and towns in Galicia as well. And so there are. You know, we talked, I talked about scale there's also connections, networks that connect the Holocaust but also, you know, resistance and other things to, to places, but a farther field. And I thought it was really important to think about to think about those connections. And as I said, sort of at the scale level, you know, you can go all the way down into the camp itself and they give up actual spaces within the camp, you know, and what, what do they mean. And as you said, I think really well earlier, you know, the history is, is lived forward. It's a lived experience. So, you know, what did what do these spaces mean for the people that inhabited them. Because one of the things that I think is important is that that that space at a certain level is not neutral. It doesn't mean that not in a determinative sense that like, you know, space necessarily drives everything. But we, we understand certain places to have certain positives or negatives or risks or rewards or meanings and connotations. And of course, that also changes depending on who you are. So one of the things that I've really striven to do in this book, strive to do in this book, strove to do in this book is to rise to solve Friedlander's challenge of writing an integrated history of the Holocaust. You know, one that really takes seriously an attempt to tell everyone story, you know, altogether all at once, right, to paraphrase that movie right everything all together all at once. You know, so looking at the experience of Jews in the camp and perpetrators of SS and of locals and trying to tell those stories and interview those stories all together with and against each other, you know, rather than, you know, my first book. I tried to do that a little bit, but it was much more perpetrator focused based on the topic and also the documents. And so I was really trying to, to write that integrated history of the Holocaust. And then, and then overlay that on the spaces in which that story took place. So we'll talk about a few of the specific spaces as we move along. But, but first a basic question, why and how do you get a camp near Lviv, and is that unusual or is that typical. It's a really good question and it starts. It starts with money, I think it starts with economics. So, the first because in Oscar, the camp that we that I refer to as the in Oscar camp or in Oscar is really two separate camps that are literally next door to each other. And the first is a DAW, which I'll show students fair, German equipment factory. Camp and it's that's the first camp that's established in September or so of 1941 summer 1941. The guy who was the director of one of these, one of these camps in Lublin shows up with the future comment out of this camp, a guy named good Bauer, and the DAW is a, it's an economic concern for but thrown by the SS. It's like an in house SS business, and they do all kinds of things they make dress swords and they make pallets and furniture and this kind of stuff that the SS then is able to sort of sell or make money off of. Using the slave labor that it has in house from the concentration camp system. And so this this camp is established on the grounds of a abandoned disused factory. In Lviv, and it's, it's, there's, there's, it makes sense, right, for a certain extent, because there's some of the factory buildings that, that make it a good place to put it. And it's near a railway network a freight train station, which is convenient in terms of logistics, and these kinds of things. But one of this is, one of the areas where you start to see these kind of weird interactions within the SS, because the SS and police leader for Lviv is a guy named Katzmann, leader Katzmann for Galicia. And Katzmann conspires with the second in command of the DAW, a guy named Villhaus, Gustav Villhaus, to basically create his own camp next door. And this becomes the ZAL with the Zvangzar by its logger forced labor camp, Yanovskep, or Lemberg. And this is again, it is a another SS concern that competes with the first one, literally to the extent that ultimately Villhaus poaches most of Gebauer's labor. And this camp is the one that sort of rises to preeminence, though the DAW continues to function throughout the war. But this becomes Katzmann's sort of private camp, because one of the reviewers for the book pointed out it was really useful in the draft in the manuscript forum was that Yanovske only was never until, you know, the spring of 1944. So once before it was finally closed down, actually part of the concentration camp system. So when I say, you know, the concentration camp, I'm playing a little bit fast and loose and using sort of a generic shorthand, because it is obviously a concentration camp, but it's not an official concentration camp, meaning that it has no oversight from the inspectorative camps. So really, it's at the behest and control of Katzmann and Villahaus, and they can kind of do whatever they want with it. And it's for Katzmann in particular, it helps sort of one of his larger ambitions, in terms of trying to gain curry favor with Himmler, because Himmler's, one of Himmler's pet projects, is this thing called the Derskangstrassafour, which is a main highway from Poland all the way to Rostov on Dom, this giant horizontal building project. And all along this horizontal building project are a series of camps that there needs to be a really good study that hasn't been written on them, because they're these movable concentration camps that move along the road, building the road, and are staffed by slave labor, that Katzmann is providing. And so, you know, Anask is part of this ecosystem. But it's also, you know, it's outside in some ways of the jurisdiction of the bureaucracy. Feel your max, with Brooks running and the all-new Ghost Max 2. They're the shoes you deserve, designed to streamline your stride and help protect your body. Treat yourself to feel good landings on an ultra-high stack of super-comfy, nitrogen-infused cushion that takes the edge off every step. Every day, the Brooks Ghost Max 2. You know, technically, they're a form of self-care. Brooks, let's run there. Head to brooksrunning.com to learn more. So, so how does, so you talked about that the camp was in lovey. I want to talk a little bit about that proposition later, but for now, that puts it around near in the midst of adjacent to whatever the right word is, the emergence of a ghetto in lovey. So, how do those two institutions, spaces, whatever it is, how do they intersect and interact? One of the things that I think is in some ways unique, and I always hesitate to use that word because I think a lot of us academics are almost sometimes overly sensitive to any kind of, you know, superlatives in that regard. But one of the things that makes it kind of unique is that because it's local, for a long time, a lot of, most of its prisoner population are locals. They are Jews from lovey. Now, obviously, as we might talk about, you know, eventually, the sort of network of transports going through, you know, offs getting going through the train station on their way to Belzec, these kinds of things, begins to sort of add populations from different parts of Kalesha. But, you know, many of the Jews that are in the camp are local inhabitants of lovey. And as the ghetto is begins to be established, and I say begins to be established because it's, it's not, it's not a clear and concise and discreet process. The ghetto is sort of established over months and months and months, and Jews are forced to move from the parts of the lovey of the inhabited to this area north of the city, which was, you know, not well built up and et cetera, et cetera, you know, but was easily defined geographically, because there was a, a rail embankment that, that ran in sort of a U-shaped arc that that book provided a very clear geographic boundary with very clear entry points in the underpasses to it. But I think one of the things that illustrates this relationship is the, the challenging calculus when it came to things like escaping the camp. Because, on the one hand, because bridges were local, if they escaped, they already knew very well, the area that they were escaping into, which was certainly not the case in lots of other places, you know, if you're deported Auschwitz from, you know, Warsaw or someplace or whatever, you have no idea of a local community. There's not a massive Jewish population in the town of Azerbaijan anyway. So it's more difficult in Lviv, you know, you have the opposite effect where you know the terrain, you have family, you know, maybe even in the city, but maybe also outside of the city, so you have lots of options. The downside is the Germans know that as well. And, and frequently this happened, you know, if you escaped, you know, they would either say you need to come back or we're going to kill your family because we know your family's in the ghetto. And there's at least one or two documented examples of that in the book of someone who escapes, and, you know, his mother says, like, don't come back, even no matter what they, no matter what they want you to do, and then his mother ends up, you know, in the camp being killed. So, you know, there's a trade off there, but there's also a really fascinating for time, a fascinating relationship between the ghetto and the camp, where the ghetto, and the ghetto, of course, it's the third largest ghetto in, in occupied Poland. After Warsaw and which. And so, it has many of the same kinds of organizations that those, those cities have, you know, committees to do this that another thing. And one of the committees is an aid committee for, for the camp. And, you know, at times and places they are allowed to provide some, you know, supplies and things to the prisoners in the camp. Whether or not the prisoners are allowed to receive all those things that doesn't always, doesn't always take place but another example is when the prisoners are taken for their, you know, biweekly or monthly baths. They're sort of a bathhouse facility in the city. And again, the, the ghetto, these ghetto committees are allowed to set up little tables at these, at these bathhouses and provide the prisoners with, you know, food or a clean pair of underwear or something. So there's, there's a really interesting relationship between the camp and, and the ghetto and of course, and there's also a really, I think as a result, a visibility for the camp for everybody, you know, not for the non Jewish population of the city as well. I mean, this is not, it's not hidden, it can't be hidden, though, again, geographically, spatially the Nazis eventually try to do that. And so they, you can see this architecturally in the camp because in the spring of 42 they expand the camp a little bit and they build a stone wall on the sort of city facing side. The other side is still bar bar but there's a stone wall in the city facing sides you can't see into it but, you know, it's a place that's, that's, you know, very connected to the city and there are non Jewish prisoners as well. So long ago, dating myself here a little bit I thought myself forward thinking as a Holocaust teacher of college students by pointing out that that there were a lot of concentration camps but only few of them were killing camps. And there was something of a distinct difference. And one of the things you point out is that this is not the way to understand, at least you're not school in the Holocaust. And so what, what functions did it serve in the Holocaust and why, why did play the role that it did. Yeah, one of the things that that I pointed out in the book and that I think is again, interesting different special rare is that the camp is fulfilling these three functions simultaneously. It's a slave labor camp, right, it provides Jewish predominantly Jewish slave labor to a variety of concerns across the city, you know, from institutional stuff with the Wehrmacht, or the Luftwaffe or the Nazi state, you know, all the way to factories, small businesses, the city landscaping department. So, you know, the things that we expect concentration camps or forced labor camps to do. It's also a transit camp, which is a, which is a rather rare phenomenon in Eastern Europe because usually, so that the ghettos themselves kind of fulfilled this process. It's not, you know, it's not, it's not set up in the same way that a place like drossie or Westerbork is, but it fulfills that function. During the period of time that Jews from the region are being deported to Belzec, and particularly the Jews of the city. First, and made to wait there sometimes hours, sometimes almost a day, as the trains are built that are taking them to put together that are taking them to the extermination centers. In addition to Jews from the region are, you know, oftentimes coming into an Oscar for a variety of different reasons. And so it provides this sort of function as a central clearinghouse then some of them are sent off to that, the highway I was talking about, and other things like that. But it also, and this I think what you were alluding to at the beginning of the question. So is a dedicated killing site, meaning that, and this is this actually actually predates the camp there are killings in the in the hills behind the camp which which become the sort of centralized killing location in the camp. Even in the July of 1941 before the campus established. But the camp fulfills this process as a killing site, throughout its occupied throughout its occupation while it's in existence. And of course, you know, every, this is why I don't use the term death camp because at some level every camp is a death camp. And in all the camps, sometimes they're being directly murdered sometimes are being murdered by starvation hunger, this or, or disease. But you know is killing people in that in those ways, but also in, I think, more constructed and organized ways. It, it fulfills this function as a killing site for a variety of different populations. And some of the clearest, you know, ways in which we see this is that when Belzec closes and Belzec closes twice it closes in the summer of 1942, as its gas chambers are upgraded, and then it closes in December. For good. During both of those periods in that summer period and then after, after December, a lot of the killing shifts to get off and that becomes the place where where people are killed. You know, the ghetto is liquidated there remain remain the remembrance, excuse me, the remnants of the ghetto are liquidated there. But also populations come in from there, they're, they're, they're shifted in via the trains from other places in Galicia and are murdered there as well. And, you know, the, the, the most conservative numbers is around 40,000 people murdered the, you know, the higher end of that were at 80,000. At least one scholar has suggested 80,000. And, you know, I don't, I don't play the suffering Olympics, you know, and, and it's, it's not always a case of numbers, meaning significance. But if that 80,000 number is correct, then more Jews were murdered at UNESCO than at the Midonic camp, which is, or hasn't recently sort of been put in there with the other, the Reinhard camp. So, I'm not saying, you know, is an extermination center. It's not a Reinhard camp. It's not a purely dedicated place for these sort of mass killings in the same manner or sense as, as those places. But I think that's a significant, a significant number that, that requires us to consider, you know, in a different category in some ways than, you know, places like Tahoe. Bougainwald, Bergen-Belsen, you know, these places that whose death toll is nowhere close to the enough skits, you know, and so, I think what makes the camp so interesting as a, as a case study is that it does all of these things. And for most of its existence, it does all of these things. It's not a case like Midonic, you know, is a, is a good example of sort of a place that isn't, isn't killing lots of people all the time, but goes through a very intense. First of killing, you know, in a shorter period of time. And again, that's, this is not privileging one place or the other. It's just looking at the, the sort of temporal relationships in the killing, you know, the Midonic kills the 59,000 Jews in a relatively short period of time, you know, using gas chambers and this kind of stuff. So I mean, it, it deserved its infamy in that sense. But it's not doing it over a longer period of time, like for say Auschwitz is. So let's talk a little bit about the, the people who are guarding the camp. And of course, some of them are Germans or some of them are not. Can you just say a little bit about how the campus staffed and what. And actually, I'll ask two questions at once, because one of the things I found most interesting about this discussion was your idea of a genocidal network. And you talk about you know, as your words, the center of a web of violence and control, and also providing an education in those areas to people who went elsewhere and kind of modifying your words. So who are these people and why, why does genocidal play that role and how does looking at the guards as a network help us understand the Holocaust differently. Yeah, this is something that, that one of my, one of my MA students, Chad Gibbs, who is now a great Holocaust professor in his own right and suggested because he was working on on to blink and he has a book coming out about to blink. And he was looking at sort of a social network in the, in the concept of the, of the prisoners who participated in the uprising, the revolt. And this is, you know, eight years or 10 years ago. And I, I kind of filed that away, but then I started thinking about, about perpetrators, you know, what, what can we do, what can we do with a social network and I'll come back to that in a second. And the, the guard force itself is, I mean, it's, first of all, there are very few officers. Bill House is a semi literate grifter. And so is his wife. These are people who are thoroughly odious and who would would have had very few career prospects in a sort of normal society. And it's only, it's only because of the third Reich that they're able to sort of rise to the level that they're able to rise, which is, you know, for, for that pair. You know, they're living their best life as, you know, the common down as wife. You know, lords of life and death over a population, you know, getting rich off of the stuff they can pilfer, et cetera, et cetera. The guards are predominant, the German guards are SS men, but a lot, a large number of them are, are folks, or ethnic Germans, meaning that they're not Germans from Germany. They're Germans living outside of Germany, whether that be in some of the Polish borderlands, or in the but not region, which is a region and sort of Serbia Yugoslavia. And actually, one of the things that came about for me when I was researching was this sort of density of people from this, from similar regions, which would have been invisible to me had I not been interested in this network piece. And I'll come back to that in a second as well. And the rest of the guard force is made up of, of Trabniki, which are, it's the sort of shorthand for a group of people who are recruited oftentimes from Soviet prisoner war camps from ethnic populations, but not Russian ethnicity. So, generally speaking Ukrainians were basically given this choice of you can leave this place, which is legitimately horrible and people are dying in large numbers. And you can, you know, work as a guard for us. And there's some direct connections to this, you know, several of the SS men at the camp had previously worked at Trabniki, one of them shows up at the camp from Trabniki with a group of Ukrainian guards that he has trained in in Trabniki. These are the people that we know the least about, and that I think, you know, that I cover the least in the book because they're some of the most challenging people to sort of write about. And so that's, that's a free admission on my part, and we need to know more about about these people so graduate students out there, particularly those that are Russian Ukrainian speakers, here's a great topic for you. But to get to this, again, to this network thing so one of the things that I did. And this is my pitch to, to young researchers, early career researchers out there. And which is that we can all be digital humanists, you don't need, you do not need to be a coder, or have any particular skills, you know, I, I started the social network thing by building an Excel spreadsheet. Where I literally just harvested data from my documents, when was somebody born, where were they born, what places were they during the war, what years were they there, how certain am I have the dates. And I built a massive spreadsheet of over 80, 80 individual perpetrators over, I think, 400 distinct entries gleaned from, you know, their, their life story, their interrogation statements, but also statements of survivors talking about, you know, they saw this person at this time or whatever. And that process for me was really, really insightful because I started to realize things and see things that I hadn't seen before, like this density if I plotted where these men were born. You know, they're two distinct clusters and one of these in the in the but not area. There's like six or seven of these guys born within, you know, 60 miles of each other, born and live within 60 miles of each other, you know, and again, you know, there's some level of assumption here, but if you're a member of an ethnic German minority living within 60 miles of each other, you know, what are the chances that they knew each other. And some of them did, we know they knew each other because they overlapped, you know, either before the war, or at different places of service during the war and so I took a software called Gefi was an open source, social network analysis software, and all it requires from a data perspective is the spreadsheet. I mean, it's a format in different ways but it's not difficult and I plug it in there and one of the things that it does is it visualizes these connections. Where were these people, when were what connections do they have in common, you know, when they had served together so like two SS men had worked in a Siemens, the same Siemens factory together, before the war. Others of them had served in, you know, tribe Nikki together or in similar camps together. And so then I started asking the question, you know, because this is one of the things I think that's really important about digital humanities. Is it quite often it's not just about answering our questions, it's about asking us to ask questions that we never would have thought to ask. And this is definitely one that I never would have thought about. Even though, you know, there are survivors who have written books called University of criminals, which should have been a clue. But, you know, looking at these, you can see this network that these guys knew each other, many of the new each other before the camp, but also this gets another piece of the network. Many of them knew each other after in the sense of they would serve, you know, and then they would be sent out to smaller camps and get us in the region, where they would serve, you know, they would command sometimes. And sometimes they would come back after those places were liquidated. And quite often the guards from the camp themselves would go out when these other places were being liquidated and sometimes it's, you know, guards from the camp going out to liquidate a camp. Or get a or sub camp that is commanded by one of the guys they knew earlier. You know, and, you know, I, a lot of my sort of conclusions are, you know, in some ways speculative, but I think that they're rounded in the sense that that kind of personal relationship matters. And it matters in that it made these things easier. It made the process simpler, but also one of the things that I think you could argue is that these men also learned behaviors that they took with them out into these other camps. Even to the extent of like very specific kinds of, of, you know, sadistic behavior. And I think, you know, it would be amazing. I think it's something I think it's a, it's a methodological approach that I would love to see more people do. Because I think it's something that is certainly not always apparent from our traditional sources about the Holocaust. The, that there's this cohort of people moving through the system who may know each other may have a personal relationship. I think I think that's something important to tease out. And I think that using a approach of taking the big data and trying to sort of see the forest out of the trees can tell us something different. I think it's, it's great and I'm really, I'm really excited about it and something that, you know, I certainly would encourage other people to do as well. You mentioned the camp commander's wife, what, what. How do women play a role in the camp bureaucracy or administration or, I don't know, as perpetrators. And, and how does gender in terms of expectations about how women and men should behave play into this. Yeah, so, um, Lieselville house is, is the wife of the commander. And she lives in a villa in the camp. It's, it's, you know, if you've seen the zone of interest or listeners have seen the zone and it's exactly that. Except it's even more in the middle of the camp. And she will sit on the balcony and shoot prisoners for fun. Sometimes shoot prisoners in her yard that are working. And is also deeply involved in, you know, the grifting sort of corrupt inside of the SS, you know, taking property and this kind of stuff. And in some ways, of course, I'm drawing off Wendy Lowers work. Yeah. Because she's also looked at at billhouse along with some other folks. And, and by the way, Liesel's not the only one. Lots of other SS men had their wives living wives, girlfriends, fiancé's living with them, either in the camper in close proximity. And, and Lieselville house would sometimes have parties and host sort of events at her house, this villa, where they would also, as a group, sort of shoot prisoners for fun. And I think, again, part of it sort of Liesel, by the way, is, you know, beyond the fact she's obviously a bad person for doing that. She's always been a corrupt sort of immoral character, even before, before the Holocaust, you know, she, she and, and Gustav lie about their family backgrounds to the SS to get their marriage approved. And, you know, she's she does everything she does during the Holocaust, then after the Holocaust, after the war, she's arrested multiple times for things like driving a lot of license and operating unlicensed gambling machines and her. I mean, she's just a generally sort of immoral, corrupt character. But I think, you know, she's, she's very happy being the queen of this, of this little realm. And very happy to benefit from it in all these ways. Of course, after the war, you know, she makes these ludicrous claims like she never went into the camp and, you know, didn't really have any real understanding what was going on there because she was so busy, you know, volunteering at the local sort of very mocked charity or whatever. But it's very clear that she mistreated, you know, the staff that she had working in her house, I mean, she had prisoners working in her house as housekeepers, and she abused them and she abused other workers. And I think, you know, and Wendy is, has hit this quite hard and well in her book. You know, it's, it's important to point out that being a perpetrator is not a men's only kind of activity in some ways that that assumption is a weird kind of misogyny. You know, because it sort of assumes that women are always sort of caring and nurturing and in some ways weak and not able to do this and of course they are. And, you know, Wendy, Wendy argues, and I think Lee's old, an example of this, the Wendy has had better ones in her book. You know, she wants to be one of the recognizes and equal amongst the other people in the camp. And so that may be part of what's behind, you know, her killing. Of course, she never talks about it in any of her interrogation. So we don't really know, you know, what she thinks about it, what she was trying to accomplish. But I think it's also important, we talk about women, but it's also important to talk about masculinity, because one of the things that comes out very clearly amongst the SS staff is, you know, not to belabor the point, but a very toxic masculinity, but one that expresses itself through increasing violence against the prisoners themselves. And one that is sort of measured almost explicitly by the SS as a way of sort of proving your manhood. And there's a great example of a very young, a young guy named Heinen, who was a very young SS man who shows up. He looks young, he's got a baby face and he basically gets teased and sort of bullied made fun of by the other SS men for being this sort of young guy. And he begins to sort of act out in the sense of, you know, becoming more and more brutal and murderous and sadistic in the things he's doing to the prisoners, to the extent that the prisoners themselves. And this is what's so great about having their testimony, is it's the prisoners that say, yeah, this guy was being made fun about the other SS men, and he was intentionally trying to become more and more manly by, you know, killing prisoners in more and more, you know, intricate and sort of powerful ways. And I think it's great that you have survivors who are recognizing this because, you know, they're observing the SS men and they're drawing this conclusion, not me. They're the ones saying, look, you know, there's this toxic masculinity piece. And this also expresses itself in, you know, assaults on the prisoners. You know, there's sexual violence in the sense of sort of forcible rape, but there's also sexualized violence in, you know, the targeting of genitalia, the sexual humiliation of men and women by making them be naked, et cetera, et cetera, all of which plays into, I think, these elements of sort of toxic masculinity that you can see. But one of the benefits of, of, I think of the book, and looking at the way I do is, you know, looking at it, I look at the, you know, very specifics like what actually did people do and then try to think about, you know, what that might mean and extrapolate that out a little bit more. And then there are officers who are not familiar, the Wendy Lauer book is Hitler's Furies and I used her. Oh, I don't know, whatever it came out a decade ago and you can find that in the archives if you want to hear her talk about that. It's a wonderful book. I am watching the time and so I do want to recognize that this is an integrated history. And that you spend a lot of time with victims and I'll just, I've got a number of questions I'm only going to ask one. What role did it play? Yeah, so in already 1942 the Nazis realized that they had an evidence problem, which was that they had created all across Eastern Europe, graves of victims that they, people they had murdered. Because for the most part, even many of the extermination centers for a long period of time. The bodies were buried rather than, than burned or destroyed. So the, our understanding of, of corporate disposal of as Auschwitz with ovens is kind of a bit of an outlier when it comes to a lot of the mass killings. So a group was established in the SS called Sunday commando thousand five operation, and this operation was under the command of a guy named global who had been a former, I'm such a group and commander. And its mission was to basically first discover experiment, figure out what is the best way to dispose of bodies, and then go to places in Eastern Europe that have bodies, dig them up. Burn them, crush the bones into dust, destroy all evidence of the Holocaust and the first places of course that they went, are the extermination centers of Belzitz and to blink up. But the next place they go is, you know, and, and they, they set up a sort of branch there, first within the camp and the killing sites within the camp and then later on at a smaller forest site within the city as well, maybe a mile away from the camp. And they enlist and list is the wrong word they force prisoners to do all of this work, because just like in the the son of commandos at Auschwitz, you know, involved in the in the court disposal process, you know, this is this is gruesome awful horse horrible work. And so, Jews are forced to do this. And again, one of the interesting sort of side notes to this is that a sort of school is established at you know, for the son of command of 2005 that rotates SS men through for like a 10 day course, where they sort of learned the best practices of this job of this job of corporate proposal and then they fan out across, you know, Poland and and occupied Eastern Europe building their own little son of command, 2005s. This death, this is called the death brigade by the prisoners because it, you know, it's just a horrible, horrible job. But, you know, one of the, I suppose, upsides to or, or, or happy elements, I suppose, or the book is that this group also revolts, and they rise up against the SS that are in charge of this group. They kill several of them and stage a mass escape in November of 1943. So, you know, there is, there is sort of a clear resistance. We haven't talked a lot about resistance, but there's a good deal of it. That again is documented and is, I think particularly interesting and important to look at it from the local level of what individuals are choosing to do. And the death brigade is one that simultaneously there's an uprising in the camp that is less successful but is also an uprising that demonstrates that you know this is that this is possible. So I want to, want to suggest to the listeners that you go out and get this book because it's a fabulous book and there's a lot of stuff in here that we're not able to talk about in this brief time. I want to move back to that preposition, as a way of getting it how this campus remembered because, as I think through the camps that I visited, and some of which book involved as a bus trip away from a city, some of which are like about housing, which is a very short bus trip away. And others are on the tram line or bus line, myonic in ways that are true now and may not have quite been true during the war but now are in a city. But this was a place that was in a city at the time. And so how do people now encounter this camp. Yeah I mean it's really interesting because you give those great examples, you know, and and while the camp was in the city it's actually almost completely inaccessible today. Because it remained a prison for literally the entirety of the post war period to include today. The Soviets took the camp and use it as a camp for their prisoners, you know, obviously initially probably, you know, Nazis and Nazi collaborators but then later on, political prisoners of the of the Soviet Union. And you can actually literally see this if you, if you overlay an aerial photograph of the camp in 1944 with the modern prison site. You can see even with like these very clear angles, you know it's the same it's literally the same footprint. When, when Ukraine became independent, it just transferred to be a Ukrainian prison. And so it's Ukrainian penal colony number 30 at the moment. I'm still making furniture and some of the things that the DAW is making under the Nazis. It was also parts of it were used for as a police dog training site. Parts of the terrain surrounding the camp were used as a pig farm. There's an amazing video that the Lviv center in Ukraine in the Lviv that I need to give a shout out for. They have a they found a home home movie of people sort of going on a picnic in the valleys behind the camp where lots of these killings have taken place. So with the with the exception of a few buildings here and there. The camp headquarters building being one. Some of the buildings from the DAW camp, which is not in the prison. But mostly the land and buildings in the current prison footprint do not date as near as I can tell obviously haven't been in in the prison. Do not date from the from the time of the war. They just don't match the footprints, at least the aerial photographs. So the I think that the there have been efforts that memorialize in the camp that generally historically have come from outsiders because the Jewish community of Lviv is almost entirely destroyed during the war. There are something like 8000 ultimately 8000 Jews that returned to the city. But that doesn't mean that they necessarily were Lviv city inhabitants. And today there's a, you know, a tiny negligible Jewish population in the city. So there's like a stone sort of 1960 style stone memorial. There is a some signage. But there's there's very little beyond that. That's done. There's a wonderful. I mean, the viv center that I mentioned earlier has done a really great job of trying to raise awareness about this. We have some great online resources about the Jewish history of the city and also of UNESCO. There is a museum called the territory of the bar territory of terror museum, part of which covers you know, as well. But it's not a place I would suggest that is on the day to day consciousness of of local citizens. And part of this makes sense and it's, it's, it's predominantly not a place of Ukrainian suffering. So it's, it's not a place that you would sort of implicitly remember. And with a lack of a Jewish population, there frankly is fewer people there to sort of literally light the candle and figuratively light the candle for the place. Also like many places in Eastern Europe. The, the process of coming to terms with the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust has been retarded in in Lviv, I mean, in the meaning of delayed it is, it is, is delayed by a communist system of memory and history that was not at all interested in exploring these things and partially doing anti-Semitism, partially due to not wanting to deal with the things it would find like the Ukrainian guards, for example. And so I think, you know, that Ukraine like Poland like other places in Europe is still in a process of, of dealing with this. And I think, I think there's some positives that they're making progress in this sense. There, there's a wonderful new memorial at the site of the great, the great synagogue, the Golden Rose synagogue, you know, that is a relatively new memorial, which I think that indicates some institutional desire, you know, to, to explore this history. And of course, literally the war in Ukraine has, has also impeded this, you know, one of the things that I wanted to do for a project and I'm working on regarding the camp was try to do some drone, drone flights over the area around the camp and literally that is illegal now, because that train station next to the camp is being used by the Ukrainian army as a military military train station. And so, you know, obviously my research pales and importance to Ukrainian defending itself. But that also translates to, you know, money and things that the government is focused on. They're just not, and why would they be, you know, they're not focused on these things and they can't be focused on these things. But, you know, they remain, they remain out there. You know, there's a project that I'm working on with, which is a Polish organization that helps to find mass graves and we're hoping to sort of try to identify some of these mass graves behind the camp but you know, it's, it's, it's difficult and you know, we're technically not allowed to go to Ukraine, like, universities won't let us go there because it's a war zone, etc, etc. So, you know, it's, it's a very challenging environment to sort of do this stuff in. So I'd like to pull back a little bit for our last question or list, our last question about the book and think about what your research says about the Holocaust and what kind of questions that we might ask about the Holocaust and alongside that what kind of questions that that you've been investigating the scholars of other genocides and incidents of mass atrocities might, might use as ways to understand those. Sure, I think the first, first part of the question you know about the Holocaust, I think one of the things that this research reinforces, it's not new, but it reinforces that there is so much diversity in the Holocaust experience. For everybody, for perpetrators, for victims, that we are still, there are still places and kinds of places that we need to research because they show us a different side of this event, this sort of continental scale event. But you know, it's an interesting place, it's a different place. And I think, so one of the, I think one of the things that the book suggests is that we need to continue to focus on some of these places that we haven't focused on before. Real quick interrupt. I wonder what will, will Jen AI and its ability to translate texts open up those kind of spaces to graduate students who have been blocked from them because of the number of languages that they needed to learn to really do that well. Or is that not likely to be true. Well, I have to, at the caveat, all of this with the fact that I think almost all uses of generative AI are horrible and counterproductive machine learning in the sense of like Google language. It seems to me to be a little, a little bit more firm ground, both ethically and sort of intellectually, you know, and I certainly have used, you know, in times and places, you know, Google translate for getting just some things. In languages that I don't speak. But I am, and I think most good scholars are just massively averse to relying on, on that any, anything beyond, you know, getting a sense of what this is about. If I really wanted to use somebody's testimony that was in Polish, I have to get a Polish speaker to, to translate it. You know, it's, it's just, I'm not comfortable, because I know how complex languages, you know, even in German, which I'm, you know, fluent and conversant in. You know, I will sometimes go, you know, look in the dictionary to sort of see what is the nuance behind this, this specific works. I don't want to get that wrong. So, I think it can be, I think it can be useful in some sense. So, give an example, you know, if I'm looking at a Polish encyclopedia entry about a person, and I want to know where they were born and where they went to school and what years they did. Great. You know, that's, that's an excellent way to go about that. If it's, if it's a question of a deep reading of something, then I'm not at all help, not at all confident and I'll give you this interesting example because I sort of benefited from an answer. I benefited from an analog version of this, because one of the things that is, again, we didn't cover this, but the Nauska camp forms the large, a large part of the second largest Nazi trial in German post history. Yeah, which is, which is the Lemberg process. The second largest trial after the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and one of the really amazing things and helpful things for historians is number one is a transcript which Germans German trials don't usually do so there's 10,000 pages of transcribed testimony in court proceedings, but also, there were survivors from like there are like 200 survivors from, you know, 10 different countries speaking eight different languages. And because this was a legal set of legal documents, all their testimonies are translated into German, which this is my, this is the analog sort of version of the Google translate means that I had access to those people that were speaking. There are a lot of cases of Hebrew and Ukrainian and Polish. But also I'm cognizant that that gives me some level of understanding, but still isn't giving me a close read, you know, they're using this word instead of that word because it already someone has injected themselves into that process. I guess I'm very, very, very skeptical of the of the generative AI sense. I think probably and I'm not an expert on AI either, but I suspect that in the language world, AI probably has much more to offer us in the terms of translations than it does in the sort of, you know, write me a paper or paint me a picture kind of world. But it's, you know, I'll give it back, but it, it's, it's, I guess one of the, the glass have full potentials is in the world of comparative genocide. Because, you know, when you're trying to write about, you know, Cambodia and American West, or what I mean, like, you know, someplace where you can't learn five different languages. You know, maybe at some point there would be a useful, you know, a useful implementation of AI to sort of help get access, particularly, I think, with regards to like published text. You know, because there's less, there's less worry there that you're missing sort of the nuance of a colloquialism that you are in someone sort of a person's testimony. Anyway, sorry, I get back to your question. No, so, so you mentioned the need to recognize that the Holocaust, we need to be careful to not to overlook the nuances of the experience of the Holocaust. What would you say to genocide historians who are investigating camps or sites of execution or violence? What, what can they learn from your book? I think, and my bias in this sense is, is, you know, I think I word on my sleeve, which is I think micro histories are, are really, really valuable as as an approach. I've written essentially two books that are sort of micro, a one that's micro. And I think, I think, you know, this is not to take away from people that work in intellectual history or work in large, in, in, at, at larger magulos because we absolutely need all of that as well. And one, one hand doesn't function about the other, you know, you, you can't do this work. And a micro history is useless. And if it's just, you know, if it remains focused just on that one thing, it's only useful if you can blow it out to connect it to larger to larger histories. But I do think that there's a lot to be gained in doing that work. Because, you know, ideologies are one thing and policies are one thing, but how things actually take place on the ground. Now we're actually looking at, at the implementation, and how are humans doing this. And, and I think that that's an important, always an important way of approaching history. Because at some level, you know, that's the ultimate comparison because we're all humans. We're all people. And so looking at how, how people are engaging with each other and with the situation and et cetera, et cetera. And then thinking about, and then there's also, of course, valuable work in thinking about, well, how does that compare to other places? How does that relate to what's happening in the center of the periphery, et cetera, et cetera. And for me, I guess it's always been easier for me to start with a very tangible place. And then, and look at that place in detail and then think about it. Whereas, of course, there are other people who are much better able to sort of look at the big picture and say, look, these are things are happening writ large, you know, and let's look at those things that that for me is much more challenging. And I think so I start with the lower and sort of things I can literally wrap my hands around and then try to think about what does this mean for the rest of us. And I think that makes sense. I was particularly struck with your idea of social networks and thinking about work I'm doing on Algeria, in the Franco Algeria war and looking at the number of people who had been in Vietnam and what they had done in Vietnam and watching what they then do in in Algeria and noticing those kind of not coincidences, but the way in which shared experiences carry on from one conflict to the other. Yeah, and because it works, it's a genealogy of knowledge right and it works, it works at both sort of systemic levels. So, you know, if you look at, you know, the German army is experienced in Southwest Africa. And then the First World War, you know, that sort of institutional memory, but also individuals, individuals have that have that as well. And, you know, they are shaped by, we're all shaped by our past and. And that informs how we behave and so if you can start literally. And it's, it's all kind of in some level. Suggestive right because we unless we have someone who can sort of say, and then people don't people just don't. Right, or give give testimony this way like, you know, because I had been in Vietnam, you know, I then decided that this is how I was going to behave when I went, you know, but, but you know we can, that doesn't mean that we can't look and say, gosh, you know. Box of left skis uncle was doing the same job that he's doing, except he was doing it in Southwest Africa. You know, there's, there's, there's must be an interesting connection there, you know, or these guys had served together at this one place and they had this common experience, how might that have affected the way that they engaged. And that's a great example, and I'll be quiet, but the great example, you know, the, the second SS division that murdered the city of or door sort of Glenn in France had grown up as a were on the Eastern Front, where the response to partisans is kill everybody burn the village. Right, so like, does anybody say necessarily, we did this precisely because that's how we learned to do things in the front, maybe, maybe not, but. You know, these these things are transmitted. Well, that's a great opportunity to plug my next interview, which will be with Rachel L. Sullivan about her book Nazi Germany and its Poland and colonial rule. There you go. We'll be coming your way in a couple weeks, but until then, we've taken a lot of your time so I'll end with the same questions I always end with number one is. I don't want to grade, despite the fact that I've got a big set of papers in my exam in my bag. I'm sure some of our listeners share that experience. What would you suggest I read, can you give us a book or two or a documentary or something that was meaningful to you while you were doing your research that that I should go read. So yeah, so those meaningful do my research so there's, I think there's a couple and of course this, I asked this question on my podcast. I always told my guests that like, you're not held to this. Just this one moment. This one moment in time that you are you are asked to answer this question. Well, you're far more generous than I am. I will hold you. My answer could change tomorrow, but, but I'll give two things. And it's a little bit farther field, but I think it's good piece of advice for anybody that's doing this work. And it's the one book is called the slave ship by Marcus Reddicker. And the reason I say that it's not about the Holocaust, but it is a geographically it's a spatially focused book. And, you know, a great piece of advice that somebody gave me was that, you know, when you're when you're thinking about writing a book. One way to figure out how to write that book is to find other people who've written books that you like. In that vein or that genre and read them and see how they do it. And, and Marcus's book on the slave ship is, you know, it's a history of obviously the transatlantic slave trade, but it's using the slave ship as a vehicle. And I was trying to in some ways kind of use. You know, skip as a vehicle to explore the Holocaust. And so I kind of took that book as a way of thinking about about how to do this. And I think another another thing is a film it's a Polish film. It's called, it is a, it is a film about memory. It's the English title is aftermath. But the movie is about it, quasi sorry not supposed to poke cozy is the Polish aftermath is the English. And it's a 2012 film but it's really interesting because it's inspired in some ways. I think by the Ed Wabner, which is a killing of a essentially Polish pop Polish Jewish population by the Polish neighbors young gross wrote this book. It's a very famous and sort of field shocking changing book. But it's a film kind of based on that where one there's two characters one is a brother. One moved away to New York and one stayed in this little town in Poland. And the the brother from New York is divorced and comes home. And I'm not going to give away, but the two of them go on this sort of journey of discovering the history that everybody knows about. But nobody talks about in this little town in Poland. And it's just, I think it's an amazing film about local memories of the Holocaust and of the position of not not see perpetrators and not victims, but sort of the people that are in the middle. And it's definitely worth a watch. It's really well done, I think. And thought provoking. So I think I would say that that's a, I'll give you the non Holocaust book the slave ship and, and the film. And then I guess the other I would say that as far as a Holocaust book. I always like to recommend into that darkness. By Gittis or any, which is a story. It's the history of, of Franz Stongle, the commandant of so born to blink. But it also does a really good job, I think of using survivors to tell their story. And it puts them, it puts them front and center and in conversation with Stongle. It doesn't let Stongle get away with telling the narrative of the story. And it puts them in there to say, actually, no, you're full of shit. And that's not what he, you know, that's not what you were saying. And so I think it's an older book, but I think it's a really, really insightful one, both if you're interested in kind of perpetrators and, and how they did what they did. And just so the larger arc is through his story, we learn about, you know, the revolt at so he bore and the revolt at her blink. And, you know, the survivors get it, get it, get a say. So I think that's a good one. It's, it's super accessible. I've, I've always assigned it in, in the classes that I've taught and I think students have found it to be a really, really good and accessible read. Excellent. And so I would be remiss. You mentioned you had a podcast. So the other question, how can people learn about you follow what you do and doing and hear your podcast. So I mean, I'm on the site formerly known as Twitter. You know, I'm, I'm still, I still have my little encampment there of, of the fighting the good fight at wait and be on Twitter. I'm also the host of the Holocaust History podcast, which I started in January of this year. We're on episode 27 now. Yeah, I decided to do it every week, which may have been a terrible idea. But I've really enjoyed doing it and my guests are amazing because I don't do anything except just ask them questions and let them talk. That's available on Spotify, on Apple podcasts. It's also available if you just Google the Holocaust History podcast. And it should, it should come up. So I'm available there as well. We've been talking with Waitman Born, author of the terrific new book between the wires, the UNESCO camp and the Holocaust and Lviv published by University of Nebraska Press Waitman. Thank you so much for joining us. And I hope that you'll be back on the podcast as your research continues. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. And I look forward to coming back when I only figure out what I'm doing next. [Music] [MUSIC PLAYING]