III. A Study of Words

This Chapter And You...

You are driving down the street in your neighborhood and you pass through a school zone. You notice the road sign ahead. It says:

What is the first thing which comes to mind? Is it to check your speedometer? Did you perhaps wonder to yourself if "slow children" grow up to become another road sign reading "slow men at work," and did you anguish over their diminished mental capacities?

Of course the above paragraph is written in lighthearted humor. But can you see the potency of words if misinterpreted? Can you see the impressions they might create? Can you sense their ability to misdirect? Can you see the inherent dangers?

The March of the Living will heighten your awareness to the power, influence, significance and impact of words. Perhaps for some it will, for the first time, make you conscious in the selection of the words you use. Words once spoken are little arrows shot from a bow - while in flight they cannot be retracted.

Make that mental leap and imagine what might happen if a government deliberately controlled the press and the media to control your every action and even your every thought!

Perhaps you can remember hearing the verse as a child and saying to yourself, who said "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me." But words can and do.

Imagine what it might be like to arrive at school one day only to find that because you had brown eyes or red hair or were left handed or some equally insignificant or irrelevant thing, that you were not permitted to disagree with anyone, to ask any questions, to speak unless spoken to, to socialize with your friends or maybe even to enter the school at all.

The LAW OF THE LAND guarantees us the right to responsible FREE SPEECH. What if suddenly that right were taken away? WHAT WOULD YOU DO? WHAT COULD YOU DO? The March will afford you a chance to see just what happened when Hitler decided to take those rights away!

Objectives

The key ingredients of this chapter make it necessary that:

1. You understand the concept of the power of the printed and of the spoken word.
2. You recall the aphorism that if a lie is big enough, people will believe it.
3. You explore the potential of word manipulation (you see it daily in advertising).
4. You learn what a euphemism is and why it is used.
5. You learn from the March to use words judiciously and that you be most sensitive to the meaning of the words of others.
6. You will learn that words can kill.

Before I speak I am master of the words; after, the word is master of me. Ibn Gabirol"

1. "Weigh your words before speaking."

...Talmud

2. "Ye wise be heedful of thy words."

....Pirke Avot

3. "Words sue and also abuse."

...adapted from Hasdai

4. "The bird you set free you may catch again, but a word that escapes your lips will not return."

...Mishle Yehoshua

Reading #1

A credentialed educator writes a text in a discipline not his own, promoting a fiction, in the name of education.

In the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources are Communist and Jewish and thus must be considered essentially useless." "....the gas chambers were wartime propaganda fantasies completely comparable to the garbage shoveled out by Lord Bryson in World War I."

Arthur R. Butz, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University, *Revisionist text: Hoax of the 20th Century.

Read the Quote above. It is written by a college professor who claims that the Holocaust was a hoax which never really happened. The March lets you see and decide for yourself.

* Revisionist is the word used to describe someone who rewrites history and in this case, Holocaust history.

Questions:

1. What is the root of the word Revisionist?

2. How can anyone claim the Holocaust never happened?

3. Write an imaginary letter responding to his claims.

4. Consider a real letter following the March when you will be properly armed with many more responses.

5. How do his statements affect your attitude toward the March?

Reading #2

1. The Gulf War provided us with a new vocabulary as does almost every war.

2. See cartoon below. If you don't know the word "collateral," look it up. Here it is being used euphemistically. Can you give a Holocaust parallel to this phrase? If not now, you will.

Reading #3

Report Card Comments:

SOMEWHAT HARSH EXPRESSIONS EUPHEMISM

awkward appears to have difficulty with motor control

too free with fists resorts to physical means of winning his point of attracting attention

is truant needs to develop sense of responsibility in regard to attendance

lies shows difficulty in distinguishing between imaginary and factual material

cheats needs help in learning to adhere to rules and standards of fair play

lazy needs ample supervision in order to work well

rude needs to develop a respectful attitude toward others

steals needs help in learning to respect the property of others

noisy needs to develop quieter habits of communication

is a bully has qualities of leadership but needs help in learning to use them democratically

associates with "gang"seems to feel secure only in group situation; needs to developa sense of independence

Questions:

1. What is a euphemism? Look it up if you don't know

2. List three justifiable examples of the use of euphemisms. List 3 non-justifiable examples. What is the difference?

3. How do euphemisms affect our lives? Our relationships?

4. Why was this reading included in the March Study Guide?

Reading #4

Holocaust & Genocide - Harry Furman

During the twentieth century, we have learned that words need not serve the purpose of honest communications. In fact, words are often used to hide truth and become a means of deceiving people. During the Holocaust, Nazi language not only shielded reality from their victims but also softened the truth of the Nazi involvement in mass murder. This manipulation of language is still practiced in the modern world.

German WordLiteral MeaningReal Meaning

1. Ausgemerzt exterminated (insects) murdered

2. Liquidiert liquidated murdered

3. Erledigt finished (off) murdered

4. Aktionen actions missions to seek out Jews and kill them

5. Sonderaktionen special actions special mission to kill Jews

6. Sonderbehandlung special treatment Jews taken through death process in camps

7. Sonderbehandelt specially treated sent through death process

8. Sauberung cleansing sent through the death process

9. Ausschaltung elimination murder of Jews

10. Aussiedlung evacuation murder of Jews

11. Umsiedlung resettlement murder of Jews

12. Exekutivemassnahme executive measure order for murder

13. Entsprechend treated appropriately murdered

behandelt

14. De Sondermassnahme conveyed to special measure killed  zugefuhrt

15. Sicherhistspoilzelich worker in security police murdered durchgearbeitet measure

16. Losung der Judenfrage solution of the Jewish murder of Jewish people question

17. Bereinigung der cleaning up the murder

Judenfrage Jewish question

18. Judenfrei gemacht - made free of Jews all Jews in an area killed

19. Badeanstalten bath houses gas chambers

20. Leichenkeller corpse cellars crematorium

21. Hechenhold Foundation diesel engine located in shack at Belzec used to gas Jews

22. Durekgeschleusst dragged through sent through killing process in camp

23. Endlosung the Final Solution the decision to murder all Jews

24. Hiffsmittel auxiliary equipment Gas vans for murder

Questions:

1. Are you aware of any use of language as for example in advertising in American culture that also serves to hide real meaning?

2. Do advertisers often use words deceptively?

3. How do politicians sometimes use language to mask their real values? Give some examples from daily life. What do we mean when we refer to "legalese" or "medicalese?"

4. How did the perpetrators of the Holocaust use this to their advantage?

Reading #5

In your March journals, you will try to articulate what you see, sense and feel. You might feel stuck in search of the "perfect word" as you try to express yourself. When you are stuck, imagine how the victims must have felt then!

We Have No Vocabulary of Annihilation - Versions of Survival: Holocaust & the Human Spirit - by Lawrence Langer

Do you know how one says "never" in camp slang? "Morgen fruh," tomorrow morning.....

Primo Levi

No one has yet invented a vocabulary of annihilation, though the Nazis created a long list of euphemisms to deflect the imagination from its concrete horrors. For this reason, we must bring to every "reading" of the Holocaust experience, an intense consciousness of the way in which "free words" and euphemisms can distort the facts and transform them into more manageable events...Our entry into the world of the Holocaust, our sense of its meaning, depends not only on who tells the tale, but on how he or she chooses to tell it. And how we choose to interpret what is told. Perhaps this is what Primo Levi, himself a survivor, was trying to say in Survival in Auschwitz when he wrote of the use of language in the death camps.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say "hunger," we say "tiredness," "fear." "pain," we say "winter" and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort without suffering in their homes. If the Lagers (camps) had lasted longer, a new harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, and wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one's body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing near.

We suffer from an absence of analogies, and fall back on familiar vocabulary in our efforts to describe this unprecedented event.

This creates a difficulty for those who would write honestly about the Holocaust. All survivor accounts and all narratives about survivors are limited by having to speak of a world where the values cherished by western civilization were extinct and to a world where those values presumably remain intact. This crucial observation leaves us with a profound dilemma, since the language of "free words" is the only one we possess.

1. The dilemma for the reader is how to "know the Holocaust" when we know our language can't tell us. We cope, instead of confronting the event, unless we make a leap in our imaginations to absorb the many dimensions of the experience.

2. The Laps have 29 words for snow. Jews have nearly as many to describe God. How do we use a non-existent vocabulary to describe circumstances which defy the imagination?