Holocaust Historian Interviews: Four Voices That Started It All
In the summer of 1993, I began looking for Holocaust historian interviews and transcripts. And decided to create my own. I traveled to Israel with a camera, a recorder, and a question I couldn’t shake: what does the Holocaust mean now, fifty years later, and what does it mean to the people who have devoted their lives to understanding it?
What I brought back were four conversations that became the founding content of Remember.org — the original interviews that launched what would become one of the internet’s earliest Holocaust education resources.
I interviewed four historians and educators at the institutions where they worked: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum in northern Israel, Beit Hatefusot (The Museum of the Jewish Diaspora) in Tel Aviv, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. These were not press interviews. They were long, unscripted conversations, recorded in June 1993, in which four people spoke without notes about memory, resistance, uniqueness, and why any of this still matters.
Thirty years on, their words have not dated. If anything, they have sharpened.
1993 Holocaust oral history: Primary sources Israel
Yehuda Bauer
Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Interviewed June 2, 1993
Professor Yehuda Bauer Hebrew University Holocaust audio | Read the full transcript →
Yehuda Bauer is one of the world’s most cited Holocaust scholars, and the author of foundational works on the history of the Shoah. His thinking has shaped how the Holocaust is taught in universities around the world. In 1993 our conversation moved quickly past the expected questions into territory that has stayed with me ever since.
Bauer’s central argument is one that still cuts against the popular instinct to find the Holocaust “relevant” by comparison to other atrocities. There is no relevance, he told me, and there is every relevance — but only if you approach each situation on its own terms first.
“If you take each situation separately and then say, look there are certain things that are parallel, certain things that are not, now why are things parallel and why are things not parallel — then you go into something much deeper.”
On the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Bauer was precise. The Nazis did not target Jews of a particular country, a particular class, a particular political affiliation. They targeted the concept of the Jew — anywhere, everywhere, at all times, forever.
“That is unique,” he said. “That has never happened before but it can happen again.”
He was equally direct about Holocaust denial, which he dismissed not as a historical argument but as a political one:
“The denial of the Holocaust stems from the incapability of a society to accept what it did.”
The aim, he said, is not the Jews — it is American democracy, or whatever democratic society the deniers are working against.
And on the question of why the Holocaust has become what he called “a code concept in Western civilization” — he had an answer that surprised me then and still does.
“Western civilization is built on Greeks and Jews. The Greeks as a living civilization are gone. The Jews are the same people. When they are murdered by baptized Gentiles nineteen hundred years after the coming of the Messiah, it creates a credibility crisis for Christianity.”
Zdroj: DENÍK/Michal Krestýn
Original Photo here
Shalmi Barmore
Director of Education, Yad Vashem Interviewed June 4, 1993, Jerusalem
Shalmi Barmore Yad Vashem interview | Read the full transcript →
Shalmi Barmore ran the educational program at Yad Vashem, the world’s preeminent Holocaust memorial and research institution, at a moment when Holocaust education was undergoing a serious review of its own methods and purposes. He was a rigorous, skeptical, intellectually restless thinker, and our conversation at Yad Vashem challenged my assumptions from the moment it began.
Barmore’s framework for understanding the Holocaust centers on a distinction he drew carefully: the universal and the unique. The Holocaust is not unique in brutality, he argued. It is not unique in revealing what human beings are capable of doing to each other.
What is unique — and what is crucial — is the motivation. The Nazis did not kill Jews as a byproduct of war, land disputes, or ethnic competition. They killed Jews because of an ideology that singled out Jews for total annihilation regardless of any other consideration.
“The unique explains the why,” he said. “What did they have with the Jews? What they did with the Russians I can understand — not accept, God forbid — but I can explain it with other precedents. Why they did this to the Jews doesn’t fall into any of these categories.”
For Barmore, this is not an academic question. It is an existential one. Are the roots of that combination of anti-semitism, racism, and political extremism still present in the world? He did not answer the question. He insisted that keeping the question open is more important than closing it:
“These questions are much more important to keep asking than to keep answering.”
He also pushed back, gently, on the promise of multimedia education — the kind of project I was developing in 1993. Reading forces the imagination. Visual and audio media narrow it. He was not dismissive, but he was honest:
“When I read I also have to use my imagination, my imagination goes in different ways and gives me more ways of understanding this than simply by narrowing it down.”
It was a useful challenge then and it remains one now.
Uri Aloni
Lecturer, Lohamei HaGetaot — The Ghetto Fighters’ Museum Interviewed June 10, 1993, Post Oshrat, Israel
Uri Aloni interview | Read the full transcript →
Uri Aloni’s biography is itself a primary source. Born in Essen, Germany, he was sent to Sweden by his parents in 1937. Not, he was careful to say, out of foresight, but out of a practical concern that Jewish children could no longer pass their school exams under Nazi discrimination.
His parents planned to reunite with him when Hitler “would be over.” The farewell letter they sent him and his brother, dated November 10, 1941, was written on the day they were deported east. He never saw them again.
By 1993 Aloni had been teaching at Lohamei HaGetaot — the kibbutz and museum founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — for years. The museum’s educational philosophy centers on a question that most Holocaust education sidesteps: resistance. Not armed resistance alone, but resistance in all its forms.
Aloni gave me a definition: resistance is any conscious act aimed at not fulfilling the will of the oppressor. Under that definition, keeping a secret radio to listen to forbidden news broadcasts is resistance. Holding a clandestine school when schools are closed is resistance. Writing a diary is resistance.
Praying when synagogues have been shuttered is resistance. He illustrated this with a small, precise memory from his own childhood. Four Jewish boys in a German school, forced to shout “Heil Hitler” when the teacher entered, who shouted “Drei Liters” instead. “Now you see in the general shouting they could not hear that we were shouting ‘Drei Liters,'” he said.
“This was a conscious act not to fulfill the will of the oppressor.”
The reason resistance receives so little emphasis in most Holocaust education, Aloni argued, is that people understand it only as armed resistance. Armed resistance was a small percentage of the total phenomenon. Expand the definition, and the picture of the Holocaust changes. People were not passive. They were resisting in every way available to them, under conditions of helplessness.
On Germany: Aloni had spent four years as an emissary of the Jewish Agency to German Jewry, and his view of German-Jewish contact was more open than Ely Ben-Gal’s. Though he drew careful lines between which German groups the museum would accept for guided visits and which it would not. Teachers, journalists, multiplicators of knowledge: yes. Officials seeking normalization: carefully considered, case by case.
Ely Ben-Gal
Historian and Educator, Beit Hatefutsot (The Museum of the Jewish People), Tel Aviv Interviewed June 6, 1993
Ely Ben-Gal interview audio | Read the full transcript →
Of the four conversations from that June in Israel, Ely Ben-Gal’s answers opened so many new ways of looking at the Holocaust for me. He was a historian and educator who was, as I later learned, one of the key designers and programmatic planners of Beit Hatefutsot, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv (where we did the interview), alongside the poet Abba Kovner.
Ben-Gal’s central argument: the Holocaust has no lesson. Not that it has no meaning but that seeking a lesson, any lesson, is itself a form of betrayal.
“From the Holocaust there is no lessons,” he said. “You can only teach people to know.”
His reasoning: a lesson turns the deaths useful. It makes the murder of a million and a half children into raw material for someone else’s moral education.
“You will use it for your own education, for your children’s education. I can’t imagine a more diabolic sentence.”
If you can understand the Holocaust, you are on your way to excusing it.
“If you can understand it is possible to justify, to excuse.
It means that you can’t understand and you won’t understand.”
On Germany, Ben-Gal was categorical. He would not go to Germany and would not open dialogue with German youth. Not because he hated them, but because he was waiting for them. He drew a distinction between guilt and responsibility: only those who personally participated in the Shoah are guilty. But anyone who says “I am German, Goethe is mine, Mozart is mine” takes on a responsibility for what his people did.
Most Germans, he said in 1993, were not ready to accept that responsibility. The dialogue would only produce normalization, and normalization would mean that what happened was normal. It was not.
His vision of eventual reconciliation is not political negotiation. It is something closer to the Passover seder: a ritual transformation of unbearable memory into something a people can carry forward.
“Maybe in five hundred years,” he said, “in the night of the Shoah they, the Jewish mother, will prepare with potatoes a very sweet meal to remember the horrible potatoes that we the people had to eat in Auschwitz. But it will take five hundred years. Now we are not ready.”
He also objected to the word Holocaust itself. Holocaust means a sacred burnt offering: a religious act in which the victim is sacrificed to God.
“God in any way, God didn’t participate to the Shoah,” he said. “That’s my discussion with him, why he didn’t get in.”
He preferred Shoah, even though Shoah means catastrophe, which implies a natural disaster, at least it does not sanctify the murderers’ act.
Why These Interviews Are Here
In 1993 I was working on a documentary project for my Master’s I called It Can Happen Again. It’s a reference to the question that runs through all four of these conversations. The title came directly from what these historians kept returning to: not the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a fixed historical event, but its meaning as an ongoing human possibility.
The interviews I recorded that June became the original content of Remember.org, which launched in April 1995 as what I called a Cybrary of the Holocaust.
These were not television interviews. They were not conducted for broadcast. They were long conversations recorded at each person’s institution, with no script and no agenda beyond the questions I was trying to answer for myself. Each of these four people gave me their time and their thinking with an openness that I have been grateful for ever since.
The transcripts are available in full on each historian’s page. Audio recordings accompany+ the transcripts where available. This is primary source material — not summaries, not excerpts rearranged for effect, but the conversations as they happened, in the words of the people who shared them. Appreciate them taking the time for the unusual US traveler hauling around a Hi-8 camera, searching for answers and finding only questions, that is the true lesson for me.
The Four Interviews
- Yehuda Bauer — Professor, Hebrew University
- Shalmi Barmore — Director of Education, Yad Vashem
- Uri Aloni — Lecturer, Lohamei HaGetaot / Ghetto Fighters’ Museum
- Ely Ben-Gal — Historian, Beit Hatefutsot / Museum of the Jewish People
Interviews conducted by Declan Dunn, June 1993, Israel. All content copyright Remember.org. Audio and transcripts presented as primary source educational material.
