Sociology 4949: Worksheet--"One Survivor Remembers"

As we have seen, racial prejudice remained strong in the United States in the years leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II, and in fact, we saw in "Unfinished Business," that we had our own concentration camps, though we resisted applying the word. Our resistance to the term, of course, reflects the connotations it came to have in Nazi Germany in the 1940s, as European Jews were engulfed in what has become known as the Holocaust--a genocide of unprecedented proportions, involving the murder of 6 million Jews and another 5 million people, many of whom were also defined as genetically inferior. Today we see the story of Gerda Klein, a Holocaust survivor who told her story at UMD's Holocaust commemoration a number of years ago.

1. What happened to the Weissmann family during the Nazi Holocaust?

2. More specifically, what happened to young Gerda Weissmann? Why was she sent to a work camp rather than a rather than one of the more notorious death camps like Auschwitz?

3. Most of those who were sent to the work camps nevertheless ended up being killed during the course of the war. How did Gerda Weissman manage to survive?

4. How did Gerda Klein's eventual husband, Kurt Klein, become an American, and how did he come to meet Gerda?

5. Why might we see the Kleins as personifying the changes in U.S. racial policy that Takaki relates to World War II and its aftermath?

Sociology 4949: Groups--"One Survivor Remembers"

1. In the United States in 1942, a public poll asked Americans to identify the groups that posed the greatest danger to the United States. The Germans and Japanese were the first two groups on the list, but the Jews were third. What do you think is the basis for the fear, suspicion, and hatred that characterized so many Americans (and Germans) attitude toward Jews?

2. . Most of us probably believe that there are standards of good and evil that go beyond the particular society or culture in which we live; we mostly approve of the Nuremburg trials after World War II, in which the concept of crimes against humanity was developed. What principles should be included under the heading "international law," and who should make decisions about the application of those principles?

3. Do you think freedom from racial discrimination belongs in a list of human rights that should go beyond any particular culture or historical period? Or to put it another way, were we (the United States) wrong to build a country where rights were limited by race, or is that only by the standards of a later period of history?

4. Thanks largely to the efforts of a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin, the United Nations in 1948 passed a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was defined as "any of the following acts, committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such:

A. Killing members of the group
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The U.S. Congress finally passed and President Reagan signed the Convention in 1988. Why do you suppose it took 40 years for the United States to endorse this Convention?