Chris Browning Speaks at Manhattan College

Christopher R. Browning, Ph.D., Frank Porter Graham professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a prominent Holocaust historian, presented Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps on Feb. 7 to the Manhattan College community. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (Norton, 2010) is Browning’s most recent work and was the basis for his presentation at Manhattan College.

“When we survey the terrain of historians working on the holocaust today, there is no one whose work is more consistently stimulating than professor Christopher Browning,” said Jeff Horn, Ph.D., professor and chair of the history department and director of the Holocaust Resource Center, at the start of the event.

The evening presentation began with a candle lighting honoring all victims of the Holocaust. Martin Spett, a local survivor, said a few words. “Memory is imposed on us as part of our homage to all victims of Nazism. If we fail to remember, the suffering and death will become meaningless,” said Spett, who has also served as the director of the Holocaust Resource Center survivors’ speaker bureau since 1996.  “This ceremony of remembrance brings possibility.”

Horn then recalled the story of Paul Cymerman, a Starachowice survivor, whose kindness directly impacted the Riverdale community. Cymerman was quoted several times in Browning’s latest book and is best remembered by Riverdale residents as the caretaker of what was then the Henry Hudson Park. His volunteer work helped transform the park into a haven for local children, and in 2003, residents renamed the park Paul’s Park to honor his legacy.

“A historical event and the memory of that event are not the same,” Browning said as he commenced the lecture and explained the importance and difficulties involved in gathering and sorting survivor testimony. He discussed the various types of memory survivors had and the instabilities in each different type. Browning posed that using survivor testimony and checking it in the best ways one can, will provide an effective way to document events, such as Starachowice.

The second aspect he focused on was the depiction of the factory slave labor camp, a type, which he noted, was, “hitherto neglected in Holocaust history writing.” Starachowice was historically rather unique. At the time of the camp’s creation, the liquidation of the ghettos had just begun, and their residents were being sent to labor camps. However, as is typical of a war economy, there was a shortage of industrial workers. The solution to these issues was to create the factory slave labor camp, where ghetto residents were interned and forced to work for the military economy.

“We cannot read through the history of the camp if we want to read stories that have a feel good ending, if we want stories that end with some kind of redemption, that in the ends say, oh, it will all work out,” Browning concluded. “The Holocaust was not redemptive; it was simply one of the greatest crimes in our history."