Understanding Past Realities of the Holocaust: Photography versus Art

Yes, exactly. Yes. Dear friends, could I ask everyone to kindly take their seats? Dear friends, dear colleagues, if I could ask everyone to kindly take their seats. Good morning, excellencies, colleagues, friends. My name is Jayashri Wyatt, and I am the Chief of Human Rights in the Department of Global Communications. It is my utmost pleasure to welcome you to our discussion, "Understanding Past Realities of the Holocaust: Photography versus Art." And our event this morning is being recorded. Today's program is sponsored by the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations and organized by the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Program, together with the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized, and Banned Art. Our discussion is held in memory of the victims of the November pogrom of 1938, known euphemistically as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, the Nazi regime orchestrated antisemitic violence across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, targeting Jewish people and their homes, businesses, and synagogues. Many Jewish people sought to flee, often finding that other countries were unwilling to admit them. The November program marked a turning point in the radicalization of Nazi antisemitism. What did that moment mean for those who lived through it? We will now hear from Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who witnessed the program in Vienna as a child. How do you remember Kristallnacht, the November pogrom?

I remember this was Thursday night, during the night, plundering of Jewish apartments, the beating up of Jews, pulling many of the men out for further deportations to Dachau. the concentration camp. And then the next day, on Friday, on my way to school, passing by my synagogue, saw the firemen and policemen rejoicing at the burning of the synagogue, my synagogue. Only concerned about the saving of neighboring buildings. Unfortunately, when I returned to Vienna now, that synagogue doesn't exist. There's an apartment house in place.

And you were eight years old at this point. How did that feel to see your synagogue in flames?

It has stayed with me for the rest of my life. That's why I identify, whenever a church or a mosque or a synagogue is attacked, I do have a reflex, a recall, seeing my own house of worship in flames. And that's why I made it my point to fight what I consider an attack on the jugular faith of any community attacking their house of worship. Mutual acceptance and respect, that is the message that I convey. Be alert and do not be indifferent. Whenever you sense that kind of an attempt to denigrate your fellow human beings, speak out, because no one is immune of the consequences of polarization, hatred, and bigotry. You cannot reverse the past, but you have to learn from the past. but in the present, you can help build the future.

We are so grateful to Rabbi Schneier for generously sharing his testimony with us. First in 2021 for our podcast series, In Their Words: Surviving the Holocaust, Finding Hope, and then again on 27 January in 2022 at the United Nations headquarters annual observance of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. I now have the honor of welcoming His Excellency, Mr. Florian Laude, Deputy Permanent Representative of Germany to the United Nations, who will deliver opening remarks.

Yes, thank you very much, dear Mrs. Wyatt, dear Melissa Fleming, Dr. Kreutzmueller, Dr. Perry, Frau Stern, Mrs. Stern. Thank you very much for having us here among you and esteemed audience. It's important to memorate, and it's not easy to speak after Rabbi Schneider, to be frank. Colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen, it's important to be here, and I'm grateful that I can be part of this here today in your event, and we are also grateful for the cooperation with the Fritz Aschler Society and the UN Outreach Program, and we are happy to sponsor this one, as you said rightly. For Germany, commemorating the Holocaust is a permanent duty and political and societal priority, and it will remain one. Remembrance is not only aimed at the past. It is an important source we draw on as we build our daily lives and also our daily policies. The Reichspogromnacht, as we say in German, on 9 November 1938 marked without a doubt a definitive turning point in the National Socialist antisemitic policies. The drastic escalation from predominantly bureaucratic discrimination to systematic, widespread physical violence, expropriation, and mass imprisonment. As the pogrom happened across the entire country, and because it exposed the complicity of ordinary citizens around the country who merely stood by as the violence unfolded, This date is central to Holocaust remembrance in my country, in Germany, for the state, for the citizens grappling with our past, present, and future. And here I would like to share a little story on a personal note in relation to my elder son, Ben. When we were still in Berlin, he attended school history lessons. And they made a couple of particular visits, let's say, and encounters. And one of these was with, how should I put it, a witness, an eyewitness, a young boy. I cannot even say which religion he belongs to, but someone living in the street the school is today in, who had to witness at age three what was happening on the street and did not understand. And my son, 16. by that time, and the entire class had the opportunity and the chance, actually, to hear from someone who witnessed the nightmare. And that was more telling than anything, than any book stories they had to read or than any film program. It's so important to keep that personal account alive. And that is sort of the bridge also to the theme of today. And what Rabbi Schneider just said, learn from the past. You can read books, you can learn from that, but you can talk to people, listen to them, and hear ear to ear encounter. That's always more helpful. Today, photos and visual artwork are probably a primary, certainly the most direct way to access the past, to visualize it. and to try to make sense of it, which is difficult on this specific topic, of course. And while we might think that photos speak for themselves, it is not quite so simple. I therefore look forward to Dr. Kreutzmüller's insights today into what the photos of the pogrom tell us about this historical event. And as I indicated, personal encounter, personal witnesses probably the most appropriate way of transmitting a message, but with time passing by, it is important to also develop and discover other means to keep the remnants alive. Allow me to note, even though today's event is not about new technologies, that with AI and other new imaging technologies, the historiography of the Holocaust may see a lot of development in the coming years, as large databases of visual material become linked in new ways. Another visual way to access the past is through artwork. I look forward to hearing Dr. Perry's insights today as well into, amongst others, Charlotte Salomon, a young Jewish woman from Berlin who first spent years in exile painting hundreds of watercolor paintings before being murdered at only age 26 in Auschwitz in 1943. Her work, like victim-centered graphic narratives by others, recalibrate our perspective to that of the victim, the survivor. You're not here to listen to me, first and foremost, but to our expert panel. So let me close by thanking Rachel Stern and the Fritz Ascher Society for creating this event and for your stellar cooperation with our team. That is really appreciated. I also wish to thank Melissa Fleming and your team from the outreach program for realizing this event. We value the trustful cooperation with you throughout the year. but especially around these important anniversaries in November and January, of course. And I'm glad to say that we have several more cooperations lined up in the two years to follow. And finally, I thank the panelists for their expert insights and all participants to join us here during the busy committee season for such an important discussion that we will encounter now. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much indeed, Excellency. It is now my pleasure to call on Ms. Melissa Fleming, United Nations Secretary General for Global Communications, to deliver her remarks.

Thank you, Jayashree. And I would also like to acknowledge the beautiful, moving words of Rabbi Schneier, our friend, Ambassador Laudy, Ms. Stern, Dr. Perry, Dr. Kreuzmueller. Thank you for joining us, and Excellencies, dear colleagues, and friends, welcome to this event. Thank you also to the Permanent Mission of Germany for sponsoring today's discussion. The subtitle, "Photography versus Art," frames the two mediums as rivals, but perhaps it's more useful to see them as complementary ways of understanding history. We need to bring the different forms as evidence together. Photographs and artworks both tell us something, they tell a story that is important. We obviously, as then, as now, need to ask who created them and why? What do they show us? And just as importantly, what do they leave out? These questions matter, particularly when we study the Holocaust. When we look carefully at different forms of evidence, it really does help us challenge the false and simplistic narratives of Holocaust denial and also distortion. So in this particular case, the choices about what is shown and what is left outside of the frame are very telling. In November 1938, photographers didn't have the freedom to make those choices themselves. There was, as we all know, who studied this history, a huge propaganda machine, the propaganda ministry. It really sought to control what the outside world saw. And the photographs it released fitted the official Nazi narrative that the violence was a spontaneous outburst of popular anger. In fact, it was organized by the Nazi party and the paramilitary forces, but you would not know that from the photographs. There were only a handful of officially approved photos released abroad showing shattered shop fronts, broken glass on pavements, burning synagogues. Obviously, the human part of the story was left out, and who was the perpetrator. the targets of antisemitic violence was left out. The work of two Jewish artists, Ludwig Meidner and Felix Nussbaum, helps us see what the photographs largely did not, and that is the grief, the fear, the sense of loss that Rabbi Schneier also depicted of seeing his synagogue burning in Vienna behind those images of destruction. Let me just tell you a story, and we're going to show an image of Meidner, who in 1935, to escape growing persecution, moved from Berlin to Cologne with his family, and he also witnessed the destruction of synagogues during the November pogrom. He arranged for his son to leave on the Kindertransport for London, which as movingly brought some 10,000 Jewish children to safety in Britain between 1938 and '39. Meidner and his wife followed in 1939 themselves. And in London that year, in response to the violence he had seen in Cologne, he created this drawing that you see on the screen. It's called "In Memory of Our Destroyed Synagogues in Germany, 10 November 1938." Felix Nussbaum responded from exile in Brussels. He had not witnessed the pogrom firsthand. In the winter of 1938-39, he completed Rue Triste, which you see here, and researchers link the painting to the pogrom. It conveys dissolution, desolation and loss, and suggest the human suffering that the photographs of the destruction did not capture at all. Unfortunately, he was tragically deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and did not survive. But when placed together, photographs and artworks deepen our understanding of what happened and remind us of the humanity at the heart of this story. So I'll leave it at that, and thank you, and give the floor back to Jayashri White.

Thank you so much, Undersecretary General Fleming. It is now my pleasure to invite Ms. Rachel Stern, founding director of the Fritz Asher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized, and Banned Art. and co-organizer of today's discussion to deliver brief remarks. Ms. Stern has organized numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and has written and lectured extensively about Nazi-era persecuted artists, exile stories, and culture of memory. Ms. Stern, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ms. Wyatt. Your Excellencies, Undersecretary General Melissa Fleming, Rabbi Schneier, and guests. It is a great honor to welcome you here at the United Nations headquarters for Understanding Past Realities: Photography versus Art. I thank the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Program for partnering with the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized, and Banned Art to make this important conversation possible. Thank you to the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations, with His Excellency Mr. Florian Laude and Mr. Mark Erbel for making the event possible. I also thank 10/14 with Katja Wiesbrock-Donovan for their support. We're meeting just days before the anniversary of the November pogroms in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland on November 9 and 10, 1938. Those two nights marked a terrifying escalation of the persecution of Jews under Nazi rule. Synagogues were burned, Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, people were beaten, humiliated, arrested, and killed. And these acts of violence did not take place behind closed doors. They happened in the streets. They happened in front of homes and businesses. They happened in the presence of neighbors, passersby, police officers, and officials. People saw. When investigating what happened during the November Pogram, written records are treated as primary resources. Visual materials, however, are rarely considered sources at all. Today, Dr. Christoph Kreuzmüller And Dr. Rachel Perry challenged this approach and invite us to examine visual narratives with them. This investigation is closely tied to our work at the Fritz Usher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized, and Banned Art. Founded in 2014, we discuss art to reveal historical truth. We recover the lives and work of artists who were marginalized and persecuted under the Nazi regime. and who were killed or lucky enough to survive. And we asked what their experiences reveal about persecution, loss of home, identity, and resilience. At a time when displacement continues to affect millions of people around the world, these questions have profound contemporary relevance. We are dedicated to researching, showing, and publishing these artists' work. which too often has remained outside the established narratives of modern art. Connecting rigorous scholarship with public engagement, we bring together museums, universities, scholars, families, and cultural institutions in the United States, Germany, and internationally. Through exhibitions, publications, lectures, digital programs, and educational initiatives, We make complex histories accessible to broad audiences. At the heart of our work is a simple but urgent quest for historical truth. Artists' lives and creative responses reveal dimensions of history that conventional historical narrative often cannot. By examining photographs and artworks, we are not simply comparing two types of images today. We are asking how different sources shape our understanding of history and what they reveal, conceal, or leave unresolved. The images we will consider today remind us that remembrance is not passive. It requires attention. It requires questioning. It requires us to consider who created the images, who is represented, who is missing. who is watching, and whose voice has been silenced. And ultimately, it requires us to ask what we do with what history placed before us. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ms. Stern. It is now my pleasure to welcome our panelists, Dr. Christoph Kreutzmueller and Dr. Rachel Perry, and we will have time, we hope, for questions following the presentations. And in the room, if you do have questions, please do write yours on cards provided, and we will collect them. Our team is here to do that. And for those viewing online, if you could please scan the QR code now on the screen to access the online form. Thank you. And now we will hear first from Dr. Kreutzmueller. Dr. Kreutzmueller is a Holocaust historian and deputy project director of Last Seen: Pictures of Nazi Deportations at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies, Berlin-Brandenburg. This international collaboration compiles, analyzes, and publishes photographs of Nazi deportations. Dr. Kreutzmuller previously served as the curator of the permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin and coordinated a research project on the fate of Jewish businesses in Berlin between 1930 and 1945. He is also the chair of the Aktiva's Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin. He co-authored "The Photographic Staging of the Crime: An Album from Auschwitz" with Tal Brutman and Stefan Hardle. and a study of photographs of the November pogrom in Berlin with Björn Weigel. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Christoph Kreutzmueller. The floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Ms. White, for the kind introduction. Your Excellencies, Undersecretary, my dear colleagues and guests in this room and on the screens, I'm really deeply honored to have been given the word here. And what I have to do is take you through a tour de force through the history of the pogrom. I'm trying to read photographs as what they are, a prime source and not an illustration. In so doing, i try to question the set of narratives we all know, so to speak. about what is referred to as bystanders, i.e. neighbors, co-violators, audience, thieves, and thugs, and touching on aspects of the choreography of the othering, as we often do in our research project, last Scene, too. Before I begin, I'll do a bit of statistic. And that is what you see is the graph of places where violent actions against Jews occurred in Germany, borders of 1937. So I'm not including Austria here. But what you can see is important. I think it is not out of the blue. '33 is a date where really violence starts, and '35 then comes back, but you can see the explosion. It's 2,416 places that recorded violent actions against Jews in 1938. But statistics, the numbers, is of course a different topic. We don't know the number of murdered. We don't know the number of injured. We can't even measure the effects the violence had on all the people. That's the first thing I wanted to say, turning from statistics to catastrophe. When we talk about photographs, we talk about a difficult source, because most of the photographs we're talking about were taken by the perpetrators of the persecuted without their consent. And Second Amendment aside, we don't have to touch it here, we're talking about personality rights. And this lady here, Emilie Freising, was leaving her hometown of Roet on 31st of December 35, she just got into a car to leave and then someone came and tried to photograph her, and she put something in front of her because she didn't want to be photographed. And that person, we don't know her name or his name, sent this photo to the Stürmer, this ghastly anti-Semitic weekly, and complained. She didn't want to be photographed. Which tells you all, so to speak. We are talking about photographs that were taken against the will of the people. Who took the photographs? And the photographs, I want to explain by using a set of photographs taken in Baden-Baden. Baden-Baden, 30,000 inhabitants, a spa, quite well known. still is quite well known as an international spa, and you've got a series of photographs taken by Joseph Kopikows who was the photographer in the place. And this photograph he took showing the Jews that had been imprisoned by the normal police and by the Gestapo, they were taken out on a march out of the police headquarters, you can see that's the big building, and they're marching bareheaded. which is important because that's part of the othering. Citizens in Western Europe and Central Europe, men wore hats. My grandfather wouldn't have ever left the house without his hat and his cigar, but that's a different matter. So, you know, like, so they are humiliated in marching out, and they are being watched by the neighbors, sneered at, it is remembered, and photographed. On the left, on the window ledge, you can see an SA man, he has got a camera in his hand, rolling up his film, and on the right, you can see behind the arm of someone, that's another man, unknown man, is doing just the same. So on the photograph, you've got basically two other photographers. Keppekos continues, and he photographs here, he photographs the man coming out of the synagogue after they had been tortured mentally in there, I'm going to tell you about that later, but when he took that photograph, a man rushed by with a camera in his hand. So that's the third photographer. And this third photographer has got a Nazi badge and his suit, he's posing in front of the synagogue, then a bit later. So this is number three, and please continue, Beatrice. And then the men are forced to march through the town, and again, you can see the bare head in it, which adds to the humiliation. And of course, the photographs add to the humiliation. They all know they're being photographed. And if you consider this from the elderly gentleman, maybe 65, 70, he certainly hadn't been out on the street without his hat for, what, 50 years? And now he's forced to go through the street. And he's photographed. And anyway, it's photographer number five in the series. So lots of photographs. In Germany in 1938, roughly 10% of the people had photographs, a camera, sorry. So that amounts to something like 600,000 cameras. And in Baden-Baden, 30,000 inhabitants, yeah, so it's 3,000 cameras somewhere. Next. So we're talking about the turning point, crossing the threshold. You might recognize the camera from the introduction. And next one. So the holy. The holy is desecrated. And I'm very grateful to Rabbi Schneier's remarks there. And this is a photograph, again, probably by Kupikows of the interior of the synagogue in Baden-Baden. And the arrow points to a chandelier which is missing later. So this is suspense now, you know? But you have to wait for another photograph, which will come in three, four minutes. And the men are forced to not cover their head, which is, of course, destroying their religion. This is choreographed humiliation, not of them as citizens, but them as believers. And at the bimah, someone is forced to read, and you see the SS men pushing him, forced to read Mein Kampf. So that's how a fight goes. And it is really a staged and a planned something. It's not out of blue. They know what they're doing to humiliate. Next slide, please. And then, of course, the burning of the synagogue, a photograph which I decided only to use Baden-Baden. There are hundreds of photographs of burning places, all taken on that Thursday, the 10th of November. And it's daylight. So in that, if you want to discuss Kristallnacht, then, of course, I would say, hey, night? Sorry, daytime. Next slide, and this is important to me, this is, so to speak, the counter perspective. This is Georg Simon. Simon is the son, or was the son, of someone working, the caretaker, so to speak, of the synagogue in Chemnitz. And before he left Germany, he wanted to take a photograph of his house. And he couldn't just go there and take a photograph because he was Jewish. So what he did do is get got on a bike, cycle path, and take a photo kind of while cycling. You can see the, you know, it's not quite in focus, and you can see the two faces of two Chemnitz children looking at him. He just got away with it, so to speak. Next slide. Daylight robbery is another threshold. And here again, this is the photograph of Baden-Baden, and this is, the arrow is there where the chandelier, the Hanukkah, standing, lit, say half an hour ago, now it's gone. And who took it? Of course, it's the SS, never to return. So that's part of the daylight robbery. Grünstadt, Rachel will talk about that for a bit. And this is showing you the festival character, the plunder hat, and it's the children who really go into the shop. In Berlin, it's Leo Schmuckler, it's in Artilleriestrasse. It's not the children because he's mainly selling cigarettes. So it's grownups plundering the cigarette shop. They're not there for the religious objects. They're there for the ciggies. Cigarettes in Germany then were quite expensive. So that is the plundering all over the place. But the regime, as you mentioned, censored photos, and they managed an incredible feat. They managed that only a few photos got out. And this is the photograph that got out via London. It was wired to New York, published in the New York Times on the 11th of November, '38. And this is a perfect illustration of Kristallnacht. It's the citizens waking up. Oh! And it's shot. And so that is really a propagandistic feat they managed. It's real, yeah, chapeau goers in a way, because that stuck and it's still there and still around. If you look a bit further, you can see it's Kurfürstendamm 203, it's Wilhelm Filippi. He had a lamp and lamp fitting shop, and you can see that the showcase is empty. There's a few lamps dangling, but the rest is gone. So there you can see the plunder. And I'm currently preparing a book on the visual history of the pogrom and I'm counting the full bags of people, you know, office bags, rucksacks, and they're all equipped. And I wouldn't think it's just the sandwiches, the lunch sandwiches in there. crossing the line into the home, because home is protected, and in the Weimar Republic constitution, and now in German, in our constitution, it's protected as the last sanctum. And even in Nazi times, still there was a threshold. Yes, police came in, but, you know, usually with a warrant. warrant, sorry. And in Kristallnacht, in the pogrom, it's the SA just coming in and smashing up. And I took this photograph from unknown SA man. It must have been perpetrator, currently in Yad Vashem, because it's such a typical German household. What you can see is, of course, all the Goethes and all the Schillers in the bookshelf. And they're smashing this up. This is someone, a neighbor, photographing the destroyed house of the Simons in Kaiserslautern. And there's only three series of photographs showing the inners of a house after the SA have left. And I think they are particularly impressive because they really show this destroy, this glee. We often forget the glee of destruction. Neighbors turning violent is the next threshold. And this is again Baden-Baden, and it's, you can see the people gathering. They're waiting for the Jewish men who had been marched through the street. Now they are forced to walk up the stairs into their synagogue, one by one. Takes more than an hour. And one by one goes up and is sneered at and so on. And it's really like running the gauntlet. That's what the survivors called it. And the gauntlet is, of course, the punishment of a mass to a single person. And this is, of course, not punishment at all, but it's a fitting description because it involves the mass, the mob. And I just cut out one young man who's beating. And I cut him out because you can see him on the left and right that you can see SS men. And they're not interfering, but they don't have to. They like it. But it's not the SS beating. It's this young man beating. And that's important. So the neighbors start and continue on the violence. Next one, private concentration camp. I never knew of, we know that 30,000 men are well being taken to concentration camp, but Hofheim SA put up their private camp. Next, how do we remember? And I think that's an important question, because remembrance is important. This is the first ever commemorative stamp the German Bundespost, West German Post, published, and it has got the photograph of Baden-Baden. But did it cut out? It cut out the perpetrators. And I think the German memorial culture, and I'm a proud representative of this German memorial culture. I really think this work is really important, but we cut out, i think that's what we have to face, we are facing, we cut out the perpetrators all too often. We cut out the fire brigade, we've cut out the photographer, we cut out the SS all too often, and that is something we have to readjust. Thank you very much for your attention.

Thank you very much, Dr. Kreutzmuller, for that very enlightening presentation. It is now my pleasure to introduce art historian, curator, and educator, Dr. Rachel Perry. Dr. Perry specializes in the representation and remembrance of the Holocaust and the Second World War in visual culture. She teaches at the Vice Livnat Graduate Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, and in the Holocaust and Human Rights Program at Gratz College in Pennsylvania in the United States. A widely published scholar and recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, Dr. Perry's research has appeared in leading journalists in Holocaust history and Visual Culture Studies. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institution in Boston, United States, where she is working on a book examining early graphic narratives of the Holocaust. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Rachel Perry.

Thank you so much. You've invited me here today to show you the art of the November pogrom. I've spent the last few months searching for it. I wrote to colleagues and scoured the major archives, thousands of works of art, 10,000 at Yad Vashem alone, and everywhere the answer was the same, nothing. Not one contemporaneous artwork made by the people who lived through it. I've spent most of my professional life, over 30 years, researching the art of the Holocaust, but it was only in preparing for this panel, and thank you to Rachel for inviting me, that I realized it was missing. That absence is my subject. Think of what it takes. To make a work of art, time, materials, stable working conditions. In November of 1938, Jewish artists in the Reich were burning what might incriminate them and queuing for visas. Some were that night's cargo. 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, including Fritz Ascher, the namesake of the society co-organizing this event, who was taken to Sachsenhausen. Others were behind bars. Next, please. Lea Grundig, whose anti-fascist cycles, The Jew is Guilty and Under the Swastika, are the rare drawn records of Jewish persecution from inside of Germany. She was in a Gestapo cell since her arrest in May 1938 for drawing, for participation in high treasonous acts. What survives is not a work of art, but an ID paper, her body cataloged for control with a stamp of the Dresden police, two fingerprints, and her signature, Lea Sarah Grundig, with the Sarah forced into it, the name that the state added in 1938 to mark Jewish women, and a large J. for Jew down the middle. This is the image of the artist the state made and kept. The image she would have drawn of that November does not exist. Next. But I did find a few works of art, only five, and they are instructive. I'm not including Nussbaum, and we can discuss that in the Q&A. Three were made during the Holocaust, but outside the Reich, two in its immediate aftermath, which is to say at a spatial and temporal remove from the event. Only one was made to hang in a frame as a standalone image. The other four were embedded within graphic narratives. Whereas the photograph takes its meaning from a caption applied from outside, these artists write their own captions into the picture itself, and they show you that same night through a different instrument, made, not shot, by a different hand, not the hand of someone watching the pogrom, but of someone the hand of someone it came for. Four even converge on the camera's most familiar image, as we'll see, the iconic burning synagogue, borrowing from its recognizability and its authority as a public document. But they rework it to show the November pogroms missing images. Next. The earliest work we have, which we've seen, is the one that the archivist kept pointing me to by, I'm sorry, can you scroll one more? Is by Ludwig Meidner. Rather than autobiographical, it is an allegorical image that folds the event into the long history of Jewish catastrophes or horbans. Meidner demotes the already congealing image of the night, the photograph of the synagogue, and pushes it into the background. The synagogue here is not property, but covenant, and he fills it with sacred objects and two figures wrapped in the tallit, modeling opposite responses. In the foreground, a crouched man bends to lift a desecrated Torah scroll from the ground, a gesture of salvage, and behind him, The standing figure covers his hands to recite the Shema, the martyr's words, Kiddush Hashem. The third figure on the left margin is an angel who is pointing to a writing on the wall with the Hebrew date of Kristallnacht, Yod Marcheshvan, thus connecting it to the writing that appeared at Belshazzar's feast in Babylon and the vessels, when he defiled the vessels looted from the destroyed first temple as described in the Book of Daniel. But this is a memorial marker of the date, not a foretelling of what was to come, which in 1939, Meidner could not have known. It is a hand pronouncing doom on the Reich, divine judgment on the desecrators, and it is rendered in charcoal. burnt matter drawn from the ashes of the very fire it depicts. Next. Eric Glass depicts the night, and his last name is kind of, I was gonna pun on that. Eric Glass depicts the night of broken glass in "Through the Night" of 1943, later republished in 1945 as "Nights" in the plural. He had left Germany in 1934 for mandatory Palestine and was working from news reports and private correspondence that reached him about his father-in-law, Karl Adler, who was deported from Munich on November 10th and taken to Dachau, where he died a violent death 12 days later, after which the family's art collection was seized. His widow, Emily, carried his ashes to Kibbutz Yagur, where Glass began what he calls his story without words. Next, please. Next. It follows the family's own path, opening with refugees before turning to a cluster of four panels on the program, not one. Go back, please. "In the Flames" relies, alongside its matrix, relies on the same sacred symbols as Meidner, the religious Jew cradling the Torah as the flames take him, but then he adds three more. His next, "Pogrom," does what no photograph can. It is a composite of scenes in one frame, an axe at the door, a man running from a crowd wielding sticks, a man pulled by his beard in his home, another struck down, we're going back to the pogrom, Another struck down and robbed of his watch, a thief's pockets, please scroll back to program. Okay. Full of chains, so that the theft is a practice and not an incident. From program here, he moves next to rape. and then force, both inside the home, insisting on the physical and sexual violence against Jewish bodies. After these, the sequence follows. Next, a uniformed prisoner interrogated, tortured at a pal in prison, and then behind barbed wire. Next, please. Next, next, next, next. Yeah. Alfred Gluck, who's the next artist, did not have access to glass as materials, medium, or infrastructure. He was drawing, please, the next one. He was drawing with a pencil into a small store-bought notebook that had been given to him in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp in 1945, so that he could render his fresh memories on paper. He left Vienna next, after the Anschluss in March 1938 at only 18. His 23 drawings open on the calm before the storm, a couple on a bench, next, then the first German soldiers driving through the Jewish quarter to swastika flags and Nazi salutes. Next, the German, the glass windows of Kahn and Moses storefronts already broken. And then here, the pogrom, a Nazi kicking a religious Jew. That was the last one. Okay. What we see in his image of Kristallnacht is the burning synagogue and the looting, but also the deportation of a convoy from the square. And if the photographs that Christoph has shown us show columns marching out of town towards an unknown destination with the locals along the route feigning ignorance, Gluck letters that destination onto the side of the truck. a camp he himself passed through. Reading from left to right, we follow, we're pulled along with the truck to the next image and his arrival in the camp next with the first blows. Ella Lieberman Sheber also drew her Holocaust, next please, in May 1945 after her liberation from Auschwitz, a series of 93 sheets. She was expelled from Berlin in the Poland Action, mass deportation of over 17,000 Polish Jews in late October 1938 that stranded thousands at the border, including the family of Hershel Grunspan, whose shooting of German diplomat Ernst von Rath was used by the regime as a pretext for the pogrom. She opens with a memorial candle and the Shema, and then next, the Nazi boot. Next, please. Next, next, next, next. And the book burnings, next, the Nuremberg Laws, next, and then Tempelvernichtung. She puts back the bodily violence into the sanitized press image and the one that the perpetrator photograph largely withheld. Next, please. Expropriation. And next, importantly, she shows us the perpetrators at the tripod, an image, she says, that was to be sent back to Berlin, showing how the regime's violence and images were used to justify and incriminate. Next. Next. Of course, I've almost run out of time, and the last is the exception to the rule, the outlier, private, interior, secular, and the one I end with, which is Charlotte Salomon 's genre bending life or theater. She was 21 that November in Berlin and painted it three years later, not as one picture, but as a montage of 70 sheets on the program that fill next an entire chapter and require a new section. Next. She opens with the regime's own instrument, the front page of Der Angriff copied out by hand in red blood paint. by the Nazi flag, surrounded by the frenzied crowds raising their arms in the salute. By opening here, she insists that this was not a spontaneous eruption of local anti-Semitic violence, but incitement propaganda, a state-sponsored media campaign. And from the cause, we turn to the effect. From the written word, she captures next the spoken slogans, here engraved on the facade, "Death to the Jews." take everything you can. Instead of the burning synagogue, she shows us the commercial storefronts, Cantor's Cafe and Ruben, and then the theft as she overhears, next, two boys bragging about looting a Jewish shop. Next. the wide panorama of the street captured from above with the euphoria of the soldiers celebrating, the officers kicking, and the stormtroopers surveying, we move inside, into her dining room, where she is sitting in the center of this composition, which is heart-wrenching, and she's struggling to register what happens. She's literally spinning her head after her father is arrested. and sent to Sachsenhausen, we follow the next sequence of her stepmother's desperate attempts to get him released, finally successful, and nurse him back to health. Can you just scroll, please? Scroll. Keep on scrolling. Solomon shows us how the German Jews reacted behind closed doors, petitioned the authorities, sought information. Next, please, just keep on scrolling. And deliberated where to go and what to do and how to get out to, stop here, please, to Australia, the US, or in her case, to France. She then Says goodbye to her native land, next, receives her father's portrait, next, as a parting gift, packs her suitcase, next, and then a series of long shots of her family, next, waving goodbye at the station, and finally, a close-up, next, of her inside the compartment looking out the window as the train pulls away, next, please. In fact, and you're surprised you didn't show these. Nazi photographers did go inside Jewish homes. An album recently donated to Yad Vashem in 2022 contains photographs, an old woman clutching her bag, bloodied people lined up in their nightclothes, trophy shots designed to humiliate. Next. Solomon's interior shows us the private face of the pogrom, and it has no photographic record. The photograph is often considered to be the medium that captures uniquely the instant of an event in its occurrence. Yet the most widely circulated photographs of Kristallnacht largely show the aftermath, the event after it is over, sanitized, the destruction as a noun. Salomon supplies the verbs, the photographs withhold the pogrom in progress. Next. Artists weren't competing with the camera for indexical accuracy. They were doing things the camera couldn't do, interiority, retrospection, capturing not only the night, but its consequences. And each one of these artists inserted the maker's own body into the testimony, signing with their tattoo numbers, depicting themselves being tattooed, reclaiming the act of inscription, showing their bodies in the process of making the work. For Glass, Gluck, Lieberman, and Solomon, the November pogrom could not be held in a single image. It required a sequence to reconstruct the past and remember it. The historian beside me has written about the perpetrator's sequence. Solomon's does the opposite. It reconstitutes a family, a home, a self that the Holocaust was designed to erase, and it sequences a world back into being. And I'll conclude here. We live in a world saturated with images, and we have entered an age when any image can be made on demand. And here's the double bind. The photographs of November 1938, largely, as I've said, show the aftermath, not the act, the deportation made to look orderly, the flames from afar and the violence outside the frame, although they can be read against the grain. They were curated to that end, shot by the perpetrator. The surviving image shows his account and not the survivors. What was never photographed. And terror, the fear at the table, is treated as unproven because it cannot be shown, and that's why the drawn record matters, and not only to historians. What the photograph cut out, someone drew, these works have been in the archives all along, perhaps under the wrong heading, waiting to be found. Reading art. with, not against, the photograph is how we widen our understanding of past realities. And that's the work before us. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Dr. Perry. Both you and Dr. Kreutzmueller have given us much food for thought, and no doubt there are many questions which our audience would like to ask. So I just encourage, once again, if anyone has a question, to please write it and let our colleagues know. We'll collect them. And for those of you online, there is the QR code if you would like to submit that as well. Please do kindly indicate to whom you are directing the question, and we would ask you to also include your full name and affiliation. Thank you so much. To begin our Q&A session, I will now give the floor to several member states who have kindly requested an opportunity to pose questions or make observations, and we will hear from these member states prior to going to our questions from the floor and online, and then we will return to our esteemed panelists for the questions. So, excellencies, in the interest of time, we are very hopeful that you could also ensure that you observe your time limits as well. I gently remind all the speakers when their time allotted has expired. Now I would like to give the floor to Her Excellency Ms. Noa Furman, Deputy Permanent Representative of Israel to the UN, to deliver the first questions and/or observations.

I'd like to really thank the organizers of this event. Very important discussion and presentation. Thank you very much. 88 years ago, during the November pogrom, synagogues were burned, Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jews were arrested. But the Kristallnacht didn't happen overnight. These atrocities were preceded by years of anti-Semitic propaganda, discrimination, and the gradual normalization of hatred against Jews. 88 years after the Kristallnacht, we see a sharp rise in anti-Semitism. And the number of antisemitic attacks today is scary. As we heard today, photos can preserve history, but they can also be a tool of manipulation. And the artwork that we saw today are evidence. A time when Holocaust denial and distortion continue to spread, their preservation is essential. And my question to the panel members here is how do we bring what we heard today, what we saw today, to people around the world, especially young people? Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed, Excellency, for that question. And it is now my pleasure to share the floor with Ambassador Tazibli. Please, the floor is yours. of the Netherlands. Good morning.

Thank you very much for organizing this very important event. And thank you for the speakers and also sharing stories, and also the art and photography, because in that way, it really comes to life. And I think the question by Noah is also very important, as also Florian has illustrated in his story when you related to your son, how he was so touched, and that words by a witness meant so much more than maybe reading about it. And also, we see constantly a repeat of history. We try to learn from the past, but somehow we have difficulty changing behavior. The Netherlands, of course, are a neighboring country, and I'm really well aware that today's event is really about Kristallnacht 88 years ago on the 9th and 10th of November. But I just wanted to quickly mention that, yeah, in my country also, the persecution of Jews really escalated dramatically on the Nazi occupation and was facilitated not only by German authorities, but also by Dutch institutions and collaborators. And I think this is also something that we should bear in mind. So our question, i think, has been partially answered, but I would like to ask if panelists or speakers can maybe build on it. In these photographs and artwork, we saw the role of bystanders, some of them violent, taking part, watching, and not doing anything. So the question is, How do you think that photographs and artwork can really help us, one, better understand the role of bystanders, and two, looking forward, try to encourage or facilitate or stimulate a change of behavior? Because one is looking at what we didn't like to see, but how can we stimulate this change of behavior? So the role of bystanders, but also of the wider community in somehow condoning or even stimulating persecutions, and especially also what some have been saying, what lessons can we really learn from those images today, also because antisemitism is on the rise and also other religious communities around the world are also under great pressure. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Ambassador Tazibli. It is now my pleasure to pass the floor to His Excellency, Mr. Roberto Ampuero, Permanent Representative of Chile to the United Nations.

Thank you very much. It is often said that history does not repeat itself. But certain patterns can still be identified in our own time. This reminds us of the importance of keeping historical memory alive. The past is not simply something we leave behind. It continues to shape our present, offering lessons and warnings about what can happen when hatred, intolerance, and indifference are allowed to prevail. This is why photography and art are so powerful. A single image can bring before our eyes an extremely painful chapter of human history, reminding us of realities that must never be forgotten. The Holocaust revealed the unimaginable depth of human cruelty, but even in those darkest times, It also revealed extraordinary examples of courage and humanity, individuals who refused to remain indifferent and who risked their own lives to save others. Allow me to recall today the story of one such individual, Samuel Del Campo. a Chilean diplomat who served as consul in Romania during the Second World War. Despite the restrictive immigration policies of the time, Samuel del Campo issued Chilean protective documents that helped save more than 1,200 Jewish refugees, primarily of Polish origin, from Nazi persecution. His courageous actions came at a great personal and professional cost. His remarkable story, documented by Chilean historian Jorge Schindler in his book, Diplomacy Beyond Duty, reminds us that diplomacy is not only about representing states, but also about defending human dignity. Samuel del Campo. Samuel del Campo's example, alongside those of gracious individuals from around the world, must continue to illuminate our daily actions and inspire our collective responsibility. Remembering the Holocaust is not only about revisiting and honoring the past, it is about learning from it, recognizing the dangers of the present, and ensuring that such atrocities never happen again. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much indeed. Ambassador Roberto Ampuero. And now it is my pleasure to pass the floor to His Excellency, Mr. Zlatko Lagumdzija, Permanent Representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the UN.

Thank you, madam moderator. I would like to thank the panelists for their insightful presentation. And it is difficult to listen to remarks without flash back in your 90s, which makes me be more passionate and determined along the lines we heard. I just want to talk about my personal witness to when National University of Library housed inside of a city hall made in Austro-Hungarian time, was deliberately shelled and set ablaze. And although the Kristallnacht in 1938 and the burning of Sarajevo in 1992 took place in completely different areas, in geographic context, they share deep historical and symbolic parallels. Both stand as a stark example of deliberate destruction of cultural heritage as a part of a broader campaign of persecution and attempted erasure of the people. And they remind us that destruction of cultural heritage goes beyond the physical loss of buildings, books, and monuments. In the flame that burned Sarajevo, yet approximately 2 million books were rare manuscripts, archival records, and other publications, almost 80% of the collections of the library, representing centuries of our heritage, diverse historical periods, diverse cultural traditions, were consumed by the flames and irretrievable loss. The destruction and its collections was not merely an attack on a library. the elimination of a people's history, identity, literature, sacred spaces, and historical presence is used to justify and accelerate their physical destruction. Both events bring to mind the enduring warning attributed to German poet Heinrich Heine, saying where they burn books, they will also at the end burn people. Yet, my country, I'll tell you short story of survival. The Sarajevo Haggadah, the priceless Jewish manuscript of exceptional significance to Jewish heritage in medieval European art, left Spain following the Alhambra decree in 1492, traveling through Italy before eventually arriving in Sarajevo. Preserved at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it survived both holocausts and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Second World War, it was rescued from Nazi confiscation through the courage and determination of the museum director of that time, a curator, Dervish Korkut. Decades later, during the siege of Sarajevo, the manuscript survived underground in a bank vault, only to emerge after the war as one of the Bosnians' most treasured monuments. These two flashbacks, one on devastating loss and other extraordinary preservations, remind us that attempt to erase the people identity and history do not always succeed. They also remind us that safeguarding cultural heritage is about more than protecting objects from obstruction. It is an act of resistance, resilience, and affirmation of our shared humanity. So I just give you one question. Don't worry, I won't give you two. I have two, but I'll give you only one because of restriction on time. If cultural erasure is no longer allowed, how do we spot it? Kristallnacht and the burning of Venice were highly visible, terrifying spectacles. Today's authoritarian regimes often use so-called quiet memoricide. Restricting internet access, altering digital textbooks, or algorithmically shutting down, banning minority cultures. How do we rally global resistance against atrocities that leave behind no smoke? Second question, I'll give you in written form.

Thank you so much, Excellency. We really appreciate your intervention. It is now my pleasure to share the floor with His Excellency, Mr. Francisco Tropepe, Permanent Representative of Argentina to the United Nations. The floor is yours.

Good morning, distinguished colleagues. Let me begin by thanking the Permanent Mission of Germany and the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Program. of the Department of Global Communication for promoting this important panel. It is my honor to be here today with you. For Argentina, the memory of the Holocaust is not a distant chapter of history. Our country welcomed many people who fled Nazi persecution, and after the war, survivors of the Shoah rebuilt their lives in Argentina. Their testimonies, families, and contributions are part of our national identity and the art. Today, they remind us of our duty to remember, to educate, and to tell the truth about the past. For that reason, Argentina works closely with the civil society, the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, the Anne Frank Center Argentina, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Association AMIA and DAIÁ, among others, to promote education, research, and remembrance. preserve the voices of survivors for future generations, often through art exhibitions, photography, and films as tools for education, memory, and awareness. I have personally been part of an important social initiative of gathering with Holocaust survivors in order to learn and to keep their testimonies alive. Sadly, anti-Semitism is growing today again, and as President Milei has stated, silence in the face of the role of anti-Semitism is not an option. In that sense, Argentina remains firmly committed to remembering the cause that led to this horrific chapter in history, to education, to respect, and to the fight against anti-Semitism in all its forms. In line with it, Argentina has been a full member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since 2002, and this year holds the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance presidency. We were the first Latin American country to do so, and as we speak, the second plenary is taking place in Buenos Aires. And I would like to thank for the valuable work of all of the panelists to show us the power of art. And I don't have any question, but I have something to say. Photograph and art preserve that what words alone cannot. However, it is our responsibility to ensure that these images continue to speak to future generations. and that the lessons learned after the Holocaust are never forgotten. Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed, Excellency. It is now my pleasure to pass to the last of the Member States, His Excellency Monsieur Jean-Pierre Thibault. Please, the floor is yours. And then we'll get to questions as well.

Thank you, Madam. Thank you, Madame Under-Secretary General, for this very timely event and the support that the United Nations is providing each year for such a worthy cause. Distinguished professors, dear colleagues, It's important to see that we are all here gathered together, first with very distinguished experts, but also with a very distinguished representative from the international community, because we are here at the United Nations, and we, coming from different national backgrounds, can testify of the utmost importance of this voice it calls. Because we are witnessing today a dangerous and unacceptable resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world. That's been said by some of my colleagues, and we, France, want to echo that. This is a cause that we still need to mobilize on. We saw few survivors of the Holocaust still with us, and in the face of distortion of history that fuel a political rhetoric. The duty to remember, to pass on this memory, is more than ever an imperative. This duty to remember naturally involves testimonies as well as documents, including photographs, as you very eloquently showed us, work of art. It is in part thanks to these that awareness and such barbarity has found its way into our minds. whether through films at the show on Night and Fog, the books by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, but also the photograph Frances Boissy-Campos saved from Mauthausen. They are sources, but despite their existing, sometimes, you know, we don't look at them for what they are. We don't reflect on them for what they mean, and we sometimes want to just put this back in the past where it should belong according to certain, when in fact it's part of our present and maybe of our future. So thank you, especially to the panelists, to have shared their invaluable views on this and made us more reflect. 80 years after, 88 years after the programs, we should all together have a you know, reflect and reaffirms that we have a common responsibility to express our absolute rejection of antisemitism in all its forms and mobilizing all the means at our disposal to combat this scourge. In 2027, France will have the honor and responsibility to chair, after Argentina, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The theme we have chosen for our presidency strongly resonates with today's discussion, the bridges that memory can build between peoples. The fight against disinformation will also be at the heart of our presidency's efforts, and disinformation is probably one of today's most dangerous cause for antisemitism. Ladies and gentlemen, in the words of President Macron, never again, that the Holocaust demands of us is a categorical imperative in moral terms, but also in political attitude. The memory of this horror must not fade. The Holocaust must not care over. It must remain an open wound in the side of humanity. And so our question to our distinguished panelists: How can we effectively ensure that, beyond words, but through actions? Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed, Ambassador. So we do not have a lot of time for questions to our esteemed panelists, but we have some very good questions already, and some from online and from the floor as well. And a common theme that we see across some of the questions is the importance of Holocaust remembrance and education. And both of you, of course, have dedicated your professional lives to this topic of study, and we would like to hear from you about why you think this continues to matter and that this history needs to be studied and remembered. And of course, we have the excellent questions from the member states, which might be of interest as well. So perhaps I can pass the floor to you, Dr. Kreutzmueller, and then, of course, to Dr. Perry, please.

Yes, thank you very much for your questions. And of course, it's a bit mind boggling to answer all that. I think, to keep it simple, we all ought to learn to look at photographs as sources, take a deep breath, and look at them, even though we are confronted with millions of photos online. And it's a constant flood we are exposed to, but every now and then, we all ought to take a step back and think, who took this photograph? Why? What does it tell me? And that's something we really have to do in the face of AI-generated illustrations, because AI cannot make sources. It can only make illustrations, and we have to be very careful that we don't use the AI generated illustrations as sources. Because then it muddles up, and one day, of course, deniers will say, hey, nothing is true anymore, because even the original photographs are not original. So that is, so we have to, in some way, we have to put a stamp. This is an original photograph, like the Netherlands have. The Bild-Daatsche Bank Tweede Wereldoorlog is really excellent work. Look at that. This is testified. Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie has done it, stamp on it, and we can use the photos. And those photographs show us that in February '41, there was something like a pogrom in Amsterdam, Jodenbreestraat. We can see windows being smashed. So, and we can compare that, discuss that, we know it's a reliable source. Germany is far back, you know, like really, if you compare that to the Netherlands, unfortunately. But yeah, we have to gather what we still can and put a, so to speak, a stamp is of course the wrong word, but it's so bureaucratic, 1980s, 1920s or whatever, you know, but, you know, put something on it, okay, to testify original source. What can we learn from it? Decent behaviour and decent looking, hopefully. Whether we really can teach our children decent behaviour if we don't behave decently ourselves, I don't know. I've done 7000 tours in various institutions in Germany, mainly in the House of the Wander Conference with children, 7000 times discussing photographs. Whether that led to anything apart from hopefully the idea that you can discuss history and take a bit out of it, you decide which bit matters to you, like your son decided, what is, you know, what's the core? I don't know. I would be very careful. I keep on trying, you know. And thank you for reminding us of the wonderful work of the Chilean ambassador to Romania. That really shows you, like, you know, in Germany, like, we have got the, I wouldn't even know how to translate it, the "Remonstrations", the duty to not to follow an order if it's against the law. The duty to remonstrate. If that word exists. And that's learning from history. We ought to do that every now and then, maybe. And bow our heads to those and respect to those who did.

Thank you very much, Dr. Kreutzmuller. And if I may, Dr. Perry, we do have a question from an audience member who wishes to remain anonymous. But the question to you is, how does the artwork you discussed contribute to our understanding of the gendered experience of the November pogrom?

Thank you. Thank you for that question, and I'll follow up with what Christophe just said. You know, we're moving in this very kind of precarious moment from lived memory to historical memory with the passing of the last survivors, and one of the solutions is to turn to holograms and things like that to fill the gap. The other solution, the solution that I have followed, is to go back into the archives and to find, I mean, the work that I do is kind of detective work. It's very granular. I'm, you know, looking in the archives, and meaning for art as for photography has everything to do, it's produced by archives, by institutions, by captions, not just by the maker. Art has conditions of production, and so we need to really think about these things. For me, it's a question of visual literacy. Students, I learned in France, and you do the explication de texte, right? You learn how to read a text, we don't teach our students enough how to read images, whether in whatever medium it is. And it seems to me in this age where our children, I have five of them, are really being bombarded by images on the phone, on the screen, everywhere, that this is a kind of imperative. to look at images to see that of which they speak and where they come from, and not just, as Christophe said, as illustration, but as historical sources that really can, you know, illuminate the past. They need to be embedded in an integrated history alongside verbal testimonies and photographs and images and film so that we can reveal the past to the next generation. As for the gender aspect, that is part and parcel of it. And of course, it's fascinating to me that Glass, himself a male artist, chose to foreground rape as part of the pogrom. We don't see that aspect in the two women artists, although Ella Lieberman Sheber takes us into the sexual and sexualized violence that occurred to her in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but this is very, really important kind of integral part of the historical record that needs more elaboration. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Dr. Perry, as well. And dear friends, I know we're at time, but there's one last question if I could perhaps ask you both. to answer as briefly as possible, and then we will conclude. And it's really about young people, I think, to your point, Excellency. One of the young people in the room has just asked, "Each medium discussed today adds its own value to history. What advice would you give to the young people in selecting how they want to document this history today and learn from it, especially, you know, in a world filled with new technology?" and methods of documentation. So, please, Dr. Kreutzmuller and then Dr. Perry, and then we will conclude. Please.

I've spent a great deal of time over the last two or three years just curated in an exhibition that Rachel organized came to see about graphic narratives. This is, the graphic novel is one of the mediums that is being used the most today for accessibility to reach not only younger audiences, but also a wider audience. It uses pictures and words, it can reach an audience, a public in a different way. So that is one of the things that really struck me, is that all of the artists who depicted the November pogrom that I showed were, in fact, kind of the prehistory of the graphic novel. They recognized the way in which marrying word and image and putting them into a kind of sequence to tell a story is a very effective mode of delivery, I would say.

There's an interesting counter move in our digitized world, and that's the haptic. People, and I know that from my scholars and I know it from my children, they turn back to those old things. So don't, maybe don't just print out a photograph, but really show them the source and let them handle it. It's like, you know, yes, you can listen to music on whatever, but if you've got a record, and the record is coming back, you know, and the photograph, the analog photography is coming back in a certain way. So like, you know, really do this haptic thing, you know, hey, this is here, this is real, and it really does, that works. If you trust the people to have it and handle it. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much indeed. Excellencies, colleagues, friends. We come to the end of a very thought-provoking and extremely important discussion. We especially thank our speakers, Ambassador Laudy, Undersecretary General Fleming, who I know had to leave for another meeting, Ms. Stern. Dr. Perry and Dr. Kreutzmueller, and especially to all of you, our guests, both in person and online, for your engagement, for your dedication, and for your commitment to this subject matter. And we kindly invite those of you in the room to scan the QR code, which is on your table, to complete the survey. And we will be sharing the recording in the coming days and a survey about today's event. It helps us so much. as the outreach program on the Holocaust and the United Nations to create the best programming that we possibly can. Thank you very much, and good day.