History, Holocaust and Humanity - An Afternoon with Survivor Ben Stern

Recently, USF School of Law was honored by Ben Stern, survivor of eight concentration camps including Auschwitz and Dachau, who spoke of his experiences living through and living with the Nazi holocaust of Jews during WWII.

To a packed and diverse lecture hall, Mr. Stern delivered his history in a steady and measured tone. His gravitas was duly complemented by the frankness of his account and punctuated by points of unguarded emotion which rolled over the attendees in a deluge of shared sorrow. Strangely, however, almost surreally, the talk wasn't only anguish and tears - Mr. Stern deftly found the humor in tragedy, relieving the afternoon's gloom with points of much-needed light.

Yet as powerful as the imagery and compelling the story; as amazing was Mr. Stern's personal survival against incomprehensible adversity the acts of barbarity and hate which he recounted are unfortunately mundane. It isn't to say Mr. Stern didn't suffer, nor that his words were not important. Yet midst the vast cornucopia of memorializations of Nazi atrocity Mr. Stern's story doesn't find its efficacy in its history alone.

The question is, then, begged of what purpose is a speech about the past by the person who experienced it? Of what purpose is a history if history has no purpose? Why bring this empty exercise to a law school?

While the reason for Mr. Stern's retelling, indeed the reason for retellings by all survivors who wish to speak and are heard may not be readily understood, it was, and is, readily seen during the act of retelling. In this context History's effect is not simply in its existence but in its transformative affect. For just as Humanity's deep revulsion following the Jewish holocaust found effect by informing Nuremberg and the future of international humanitarian law, the revulsion felt by the audience informed their futures, indelibly.

Sadness, anger, sorrow and hate are empty concepts until experienced - a fact attested by the often surprised, often desperate and even fatalistic expressions of Mr. Stern's as he relived the events of his past. Yet it was not only Mr. Stern's face which showed these emotions. Concomitant with him was the audience: gasping, tearing, knowing and drawing breath in a unison of shared experience.

"These things that happened" he spoke while grasping his trunk, "they are in me. I swallowed them and they make me up."

Survivor's retellings aren't important for the factual content. They're important so that the audience, through live co-experience, can, in a sense also swallow those experiences and take them in, and though while comparatively they can only but
be informed by these experiences to a degree, they still are, in future, made up of them.

"Never again" is the pleading cry of victim survivors but through experiencing a survivor speak it becomes the aspirational declaration of all.

"Never again" speaks to the need to have, pursue and preserve justice once found and is, therefore, of fundamental interest and of fundamental import to the law, it's students and practitioners.

"Dear Dean Brand..."

Dear Dean Brand,

The students from the Cambodian Genocide course have been settling in nicely. Please forgive the tardiness of this letter as between jet-lag, becoming accustomed to life here and school we've been very busy.

We're all very excited to be here and for almost all of us, it is our first time in Cambodia.

I think I can say without a hint of patronizing indulgence that it is really rather refreshing to have a first-hand view of how the other half live. At best it is a sobering reminder of privilege and, at worst, an inevitable sympathy that pains the heart - the entrepreneurial effervescence of a yet destitute population and a leprous man who suffered the, I'm sure, unwilling amputation of his lips and eye-brows serve as good examples.

To paraphrase an ex-colonial subject of Her Majesty, it's "really rather Somerset Maugham, isn't it, that Country? And with every cold beer that goes down I think it becomes more so."

It's true.

No matter how noble our intentions, nor how ameliorative an effect we wish to have; no matter how much we learn of their customs and culture, nor how far we abrogate our self-indulgent instincts; we are and always will be of the privileged set and can but observe from a detached vantage.

Which brings me to the title of this post.

We are, to a person, here with the sincere desire to learn of the recent, tragic, history of Cambodia as an object lesson to inform our future as jurists. However we cannot avoid making certain cultural faux pas as we find the outside limits of our wealth-induced sense of entitlement. A sense which is inescapably tied to our upbringing in the richest country the world has known.

We've created a sort of self-deprecatory joke we say in embarrassment whenever we find ourselves inadvertently being "American" - complaining that HBO shows Superman too often or of the smell of rotten Durian or that the speed our Internet connection is reminiscent of 1996. The joke begins with a pantomimed typing of a letter and the words, "Dear Dean Brand..." followed by a recitation of the offending word or action, recapitulated to highlight the relative absurdity of what's just happened.

It's an exercise in humility, one we thought would be fun to bring to this blog. Since we're here representing the USF community we thought it would be fun to write these posts as letters back to you, specifically, as de-facto, metaphorical patriarch.

We hope you'll enjoy our reports.

Sincerely,

-Jamal, Addie, Ann, Ryan and Paige