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11. The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust

Author:
Simone Gigliotti
Publication Date:
01-2016
Content Type:
Book
Institution:
Berghahn Books
Abstract:
Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.
Topic:
Genocide, Infrastructure, Holocaust, World War II, and Anti-Semitism
Political Geography:
Europe, Eastern Europe, Poland, and Germany

12. Anti-Discrimination Exceptionalism: Racist Violence before the ECtHR and the Holocaust Prism

Author:
Ruth Rubio-Marín and Mathias Möschel
Publication Date:
10-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Over the past years, the European Court of Human Rights has significantly developed and strengthened its Article 14 non-discrimination jurisprudence, including in a number of ground-breaking international law cases establishing increased state responsibility with regard to ethnic segregation in education and gender violence. However, in the type of cases that constitute a large part of its non-discrimination case load, namely physical violence against racial minorities, the Court has so far failed to adequately address Article 14 discrimination claims raised by the victims. We posit that this could be caused in part by what we call the ‘Holocaust Prism’. Put briefly, the experience of the Holocaust has shaped the manner in which continental European courts understand racism and race discrimination, at least (or especially) when it is combined with violence. Paradoxically, this entails that in the most heinous cases of race discrimination, the discrimination threshold is raised to the level of criminal conduct. Moreover, to the extent that it is, only the ethnic dimension of such discrimination is foregrounded even in cases that present obvious intersectional (for example, ethnicity plus gender) dimensions. We exemplify this phenomenon by discussing recent case law on forced sterilization of Roma women and argue that the Court should become aware of this issue, recognize intersectional discrimination and align its case law on racist violence with the discrimination doctrine emerging in its gender violence and educational race segregation cases, both for the sake of internal consistency and to better capture the structural nature of racial discrimination in Europe.
Topic:
International Law, Ethnicity, Gender Based Violence, Holocaust, Roma, and Discrimination
Political Geography:
Europe and Czech Republic