New York, NY – For This Instructor, Teaching About Genocide Is Personal

New York, NY – Just days after liberation, surrounded by starvation and disease, a young woman looked into a soldier’s movie camera and described the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.

Months later, the same woman, Hadassah Bimko, gave crucial, tearful testimony at the trial of the camp commander and guards. Allied prosecutors included her filmed interview in a shocking documentary that was entered into evidence at the trial, at Nuremberg, of high-ranking Nazis.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft showed that 1945 film clip to his class on the law of genocide, at Columbia Law School, but to him, the woman in flickering black-and-white was no distant witness to history. She is his mother.

The law often tries to weigh matters clinically, but a class that dwells on atrocities cannot escape emotion. And it cannot help being personal when the professor is the Jewish son of two Holocaust survivors whose families were wiped out.

Yet Rosensaft, 63, who is teaching the class at Columbia for the first time, manages to take an almost dispassionate approach, as if to say that outrage is fine, but then what? He peppers his lectures and conversation with hypothetical questions devised to avoid easy answers.

“Where are the lines separating free speech, hate speech and incitement to genocide, which was a major factor in Rwanda?” he asked his class recently. “Which one is it when Ahmadinejad calls for the eradication of Israel?”

Noting that at Nuremberg, the Allies imposed new laws retroactively, to prosecute people who could claim that their actions were allowed under wartime German law, he asked, “How is that different than if the Union had prosecuted Southerners after the Civil War for having been slave owners?”

He draws students’ attention to inconsistent verdicts and sentences at Nuremberg, and the fact that, decades later, nations pivoted quickly from treating Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, as a dignitary, to calling him a war criminal.

“There are always political elements to these cases,” he said. “There are always ambiguities.”

Beneath the measured tone, he knows the meaning of genocide better than most people. His parents, who came from different towns in Poland, were both sent with their families to Auschwitz.

His mother was torn from her 5-year-old son, her first husband and her parents, who all went to the gas chambers. A dental surgeon, she was put to work caring for sick prisoners, but could not save her own sister, who died in the camp. Knowing that the seriously ill were killed, she tried to keep patients out of the infirmary when there was a “selection” for gassing.

“Growing up, I saw countless women come up to her and say, ‘Doctor, you saved my life,”’ Rosensaft said.

His father, Josef, leapt from a train headed to Auschwitz, where his first wife and stepdaughter were killed. He escaped, despite being shot as he fled. After being rounded up again, he escaped from a labor camp. Caught a third time, he was sent to Auschwitz and then to Dora-Mittelbau, where prisoners were literally worked to death on Germany’s rocket program.

In the last months of the war, the Germans transferred prisoners, including Rosensaft’s parents, from other sites to Bergen-Belsen, where starvation and disease killed an estimated 50,000 inmates.

His parents met and married in the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, where he was born. They became leaders of the survivor community, in Europe and later in the United States, where they moved in the 1950s.

“They always were forward-looking, so the Holocaust was a fact of life, something they talked about, but not something they wallowed in,” Rosensaft said. “Some of the stories were almost like adventure stories, and I knew those things before I knew all of the horrors.”

As an adult, he has remained immersed in that world, as a leading advocate and spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors. His wife, Jean Bloch Rosensaft, an administrator at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, is also a child of survivors; his parents and hers were good friends.

A lawyer by trade, Menachem Rosensaft worked in securities and international law before becoming general counsel of the World Jewish Congress. For several years, he has taught classes similar to the one at Columbia, at the law schools of Cornell and Syracuse.

His Columbia students say his experience gives an immediacy to an already powerful subject. “In this class, you can’t be detached from what you’re talking about,” said one student, Sira Franzini, who is from Italy – especially when “the professor is part of that history.”

More than half of the 21 students in the class are foreign, and several said that to them, ethnic conflict and atrocities are not as remote as they are to Americans.

Clare Lawson, who is from Ireland, said she had worked on the prosecution of Yugoslav war crimes at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Several students are from the Netherlands, where such cases, and questions of tolerance between Christians and Muslims, are big news.

Rosensaft stresses that the field his class covers is new, and still evolving. Until the Holocaust, the term “genocide” did not exist, “crimes against humanity” was not yet a legal term, and international courts did not try national leaders. It was generally understood that if a nation slaughtered people within its own borders, neighboring countries would not intervene.

“Each instance of genocide has its own characteristics, and each time we learn how the law can be flexible and adapt,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re still learning.”