On 11-12th July 2024, Barnabas Balint (University of Oxford) and Charlotte Gibbs (University of Southern California) convened the ‘Animals and the Holocaust’ interdisciplinary workshop at Magdalen College. It brought together ten scholars from eight institutions across four countries for two days of collaborative discussions and presentations about the relationship between animals and the Holocaust.
Barnabas and Charlotte opened our workshop with a discussion about methodology and approaches, and the kinds of questions we can/are interested in asking. The first panel “Representations of Animals” examined the literary and metaphoric employment of animals. Dr. Roseanna Ramsden started our workshop by exploring the animal and nature references in Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Smoke over Birkenau as suggestive of the loss of ‘normal life’. Dr. Emly-Rose Baker examined the position of ‘Dila’, the family dog in the film Zone of Interest, as a possible non-human animal witness. Baker argued that Dila was an ‘ambiguous character’: as both guard and pet. Dila ‘witnessed’ via whimpers while behind closed doors, Hedwig tried on the fur coats of recently arrived prisoners. Dr. Anna Elena Torres drew from poetry by Abraham Sutzkever to examine the different ways Sutzkever employed animals and animal metaphors. In one such poem, ‘Near a Warm Hill,’ Sutzkever painted a picture of a horse’s excrement as the source of temporary and needed warmth, but the horse itself wasn’t explicitly mentioned.
The second panel “Finding Animals in Sources” engaged with the – metaphoric or real – presence of animals in archival materials. Sarah Ernst probed through oral testimonies held in the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to examine how interviewees described Queer and non-heteronormative acts and relations. In particular, their discussion centered around the layered and complicated term of ‘pet’ – a label assigned to individuals who engaged in same-sex relationships and often within an unbalanced power structure. Charlotte Gibbs examined the limitations of finding female guard perpetrators despite the numerous recollections of female guards who were accompanied by guard dogs. Barnabas Balint presented a near comprehensive account of animal presence in the Yad Vashem Archives. Balint argued that since animals cannot create sources by themselves, one could turn to approaches used to uncover children as a methodology for finding animals.
The last panel “Animals during the Holocaust” explored the multiple roles embodied by animals during the war. Ramneek Sodhi’s presentation centered on the Buchenwald Zoo and how the Nazi worldview reshaped animal-human relations. In particular, the zoo was redesigned to appeal to an imagined Germanic past, and which became a space for camp personnel to experience ‘everyday life’ while surrounded by inmates. Dr. Peter Arnds examined the position of bees within the biopolitics of Nazi ideology. He drew from Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer to develop the idea of the Bestia Sacer, and brought it into conversation with Herrentiere and ungeziefer. Dr. Hannah Wilson explored the representations and legacies of ‘Barry’, the St. Bernard of Sobibor death camp. Due to the collective memories surrounding ‘Barry,’ Wilson suggested the possibility of it becoming an icon of the Holocaust. My paper was the last one in this panel. It drew from my larger research on the experiences of Jewish refugees in Hong Kong and Singapore. My presentation explored the presence of cats in the photograph albums belonging to Shanghai Jewish refugees. I suggested that these photographs reveal more about the refugees’ construction of family and who was included, and the hidden emotions behind their absence from the stories of escaping the Third Reich or postwar Shanghai. We wrapped up our workshop with a closing session led by Barnabas and Charlotte that went over common themes and questions addressed throughout each presenters’ papers.
Attending and participating in this generative workshop was extremely helpful. It was eye-opening to see the different approaches workshop participants took and what they were able to reveal. Yet, as an interdisciplinary event, it also highlighted a clear difference between the historians and the non-historians. Whereas the historians were asking questions about the sources and documentations – the empirical data, the non-historians were more interested in how animals were employed as metaphors or allegories, and the theories of animals as literary devices/figures. Labels was another topic that proved fruitful. The presenters were using terms such as ‘pet’, ‘livestock’, ‘domestic,’ and ‘wild’ in different ways: Ernst’s ‘pet’ and Sun’s ‘pet’ did not mean the same thing. Whereas the latter referred to a cat, the former was deployed in revealing the blurring boundaries of dehumanization – that through a Queer history approach, it can insinuate ‘training’ and ‘learned behaviour’ and therefore could also be ‘unlearned’. We also circled around the idea of animals as witnesses: what it meant, and how it could be understood. As Balint and Sodhi suggested, when animals appeared in the records, it was mediated by a human actor and often showcased an extractive relationship: the animal as labour. For my part, the questions about my paper helped to expand my thinking about the relationship between animal photographs and Jewish refugees. I concluded my presentation by raising the possible affinities between these animal photographs with the few photographs of the Chinese servants or workers found in Shanghai Jewish refugee’s albums. Would they have been considered ‘family’ despite their extractive employer-employee relationship? What productive questions can we raise about Jewish refugees’ entanglement with Race and whiteness in colonial spaces? Overall, this workshop has been an excellent help in thinking through and writing my dissertation.
Biography
Cheuk Him Ryan Sun is a PhD candidate in the department of History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the entangled histories of the British Empire and the Holocaust, expanding the geography of Jewish exile by looking at the experiences of Austrian and German Jewish refugees in the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore between 1938 and 1941.