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Chapter 4 Building Up a Memory: Austria, Switzerland, and Europe Face the Holocaust Avi Beker The Auschwitz experience is singular in that it forces the human being of this new century to confront his or her memory and make it either a burden or a privilege. Pushed to the extreme limits, and perhaps beyond, of his or her possibilities, anyone entering the memory of those who remember Auschwitz will have to confront it with humility. —Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Stockholm, January 2000 [Young people] should be made aware of the country’s troubled times. A nation’s history cannot be based on a mythology that was built up over  years. So our findings should be part of the school programme, but it’s up to other experts to decide how best this can be done. —Jean-François Bergier, chairman of the International Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland, World War II ‘‘TELL YE YOUR CHILDREN’’ A unique conference took place in Stockholm at the end of January 2000. Forty-three heads of states and foreign ministers, together with world leading historians and educators, gathered for three days to discuss education and commemoration of the Holocaust. The eight hundred journalists who joined U.S. president Bill Clinton, European leaders, and other world leaders provided an additional dimension to the extraordinary awakening of world interest in the events of the Holocaust, more than fifty years later. The choice of Sweden as the conference venue can illustrate how historical consciousness about the Holocaust was developing in the 1990s. In late 1996, unflattering facts regarding Sweden’s role in the theft of Jewish property came to light. Sweden, which claimed ‘‘neutrality’’ during World War II, maintained strong commercial ties with Nazi Germany until the end of the 97 98 Avi Beker war.1 State economic and political leaders continued with ‘‘business as usual’’—including the regular transfer of strategic materials to the German military—even after Stockholm learned of the Nazi horrors. In a series of meetings between members of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and Sweden ’s prime minister and foreign minister in 1996 and early 1997, a decision was made to set up a government commission of inquiry, with members of the WJC and the Jewish community, to examine the transfer of Nazi gold to Sweden, trade with Germany, and the fate of financial deposits and art confiscated from the Jews.2 The WJC is an international nongovernmental Jewish organization that serves as an umbrella and diplomatic arm to world Jewish communities. At the same time that the WJC was involved in the Swedish case, the organization was leading a major political and media campaign on an international scale against the Swiss government and its major banks regarding their World War II economic dealings with Nazi Germany and their refusal to negotiate the return of dormant bank accounts and stolen property to Holocaust victims or their kin (see below). In sharp contrast to the Swiss attempt to hide its Nazi dealings behind the smoke screen of its World War II neutrality, the Swedish prime minister, Göran Persson, succeeded in turning his country’s historical problem into an educational and moral lever.3 After discovering wide ignorance of the Holocaust among Swedish youth, Prime Minister Persson initiated an educational project on the Holocaust using the popular Jewish motto of the Passover Hagada and remembrance: ‘‘Tell Ye Your Children.’’ Two million copies of a textbook on the history of the Holocaust were distributed between 1997 and 1999 in Swedish schools and were translated into some of the languages used by Sweden’s minorities (including Arabic and Persian). At the same time, Persson embarked upon an international campaign for Holocaust education that featured international conferences with the participation of heads of states, special governmental task forces on education, and efforts to provide literature and curricula on the Holocaust to many countries in their native languages. In his opening address to the conference in January 2000, Persson stated: ‘‘We failed the test of our responsibility during the war and the failure will remain with us forever . For this, I express deepest regret.’’ His words placed the concept of neutrality in international relations under new light and highlighted the role of the Holocaust as a catalyst for the transformation of Swedish collective memory as well as that of other European countries. The conference decided on the establishment of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, which consists of representatives...

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