Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory by Oren Baruch Stier

Abstract

HOLOCAUST ICONS: SYMBOLIZING THE SHOAH IN HISTORY AND MEMORY By Oren Baruch Stier. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.In August 1944, the Gestapo and local police collaborators arrested fifteenyear-old Annelies Marie Frank, her family, and four others who had hidden for roughly two years in the Secret Annex at 263 Prinsengracht. Initially interned at Westerbork in the Netherlands, they were among the last Jews transported from the camp to the complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Frank and her older sister, Margot, were later sent to Bergen-Belsen, where both perished of typhus in early 1945. Owing largely to what Oren Baruch Stier describes Frank's unique persona . . . and particular story, she has since become primary symbol of identification with the victims of the Holocaust. Widely recognized through recurrently exhibited images and the published version of her writings while in hiding, Frank's persona has in several respects remained quite static. And yet, Stier demonstrates, it has also continued to develop, accruing varying layers of meaning over time a result of representations on stage and screen well in print.In this thoughtfully researched and insightful study, Stier closely investigates four markedly diverse icons that, along with the persona of Anne Frank, includes the Holocaust-era railway car, the phrase Arbeit macht frei and the number six million. Each, he explains, has not only reappeared in various forms, but has also come to summarize complex narratives of the Shoah, simplifying, condensing, and distilling these narratives and producing meaning for cultural consumption. What principally defines the symbols Stier writes about, however, is that they signify, because of their own histories, an inherent connection to the Holocaust, one that cannot easily be stripped away. In addition to detailing each icon's significance and diverse uses in the post-Holocaust memorial landscape, he thus takes great care to situate it in historical context. The resulting chapter-length case studies are distinct from one another and, at the same time, cogently interconnected.Stier's examination of railway car installations explores the implications of even subtly differing approaches to placing symbolic objects in memorial and museological settings. A particularly resonant artifact of the Holocaust that has been deployed in an increasing number of locations, the railway car often acts as a symbolic anchor and focal point. Investigating four of the earliest displays, Stier suggests that each typifies an identifiable memorial strategy. He characterizes the approach at the Florida Holocaust Memorial Museum in St. Petersburg, for instance, ambivalent symbolism. While the boxcar is located prominently in the exhibition area and visitors are permitted to touch the exterior, the interior is completely inaccessible. This placement accentuates the railway car's tangibility an artifact, but because the inside is closed off, the exhibit in effect communicates the inability to experience anything of the interiority of the Holocaust at first hand. …