FELLOWSHIPS AT AUSCHWITZ
FOR THE STUDY
OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS (FASPE) PARTNERS
WITH MEMORIA
For over a decade, Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) has awarded fellowships to young professionals to study, converse, remember, and even to look to the future, at the sites where the Holocaust was conceived, planned, and carried out.
FASPE
Whether at the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin or standing with consummate sadness inside the latrine barracks at Birkenau, wondering nearby at the giant cisterns who the engineers were who designed the complex sewage system, we bring our Fellows to these sites because we believe in the fundamental power of place. By examining Nazi atrocities where the Nazi- era professionals worked, we have confidence that young professionals—physicians, lawyers, technologists, businesspeople, religious leaders, and journalists—will learn from the tragic decision-making of the past. With now close to 1000 alumni, each year we return to Auschwitz in the hope that those who most influence society, its early-career leaders, may come to understand the forces—big and small—that make complicity possible and their responsibility to do better. Place is an indispensable part of our vision.
As survivors pass away and generations lose certain physical, tangible connections to the Holocaust, FASPE seeks a new, complementary way to remember and to make productive use of that memory. How do we continue to learn these essential lessons in a changing world? How are today’s young people, especially its future leaders, to come to grips with these atrocities? Our answer is that young professionals must study the perpetrators. They must be able to put themselves in the minds of those who, all too often for the most mundane, career-oriented reasons, became complicit with evil. Why did Topf & Sons build the ovens? What led otherwise well-respected doctors to engage in human experimentation? Why did pastors remain silent in the face of hate? Through our Fellowship experience, FASPE asks our Fellows to consider these questions and to see their own potential to ethical complicity in past decisions.
It is because of our proud commitment to ethical leadership that we have gratefully partnered with Memoria to bring regular pieces to its readers. We are thankful for this opportunity to share our Fellows’ work with you. Many of these articles come from our annual Journal, which publishes personal reflections, historical analyses, and other reactions by our Fellows to their Fellowship experience, to the importance and power of place, and to the requirement of memory. Readers will see in their explorations and cogitations their own working through of the power and influence of Auschwitz. We believe their writing reflects the urgency and timeliness of FASPE’s approach. We hope you agree.
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