DIGNITY AND BRUTALITY IN JOURNALISTIC MEMORY
Laura Glesby, FASPE
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) promotes ethical leadership for today’s professionals through annual fellowships, ethical leadership trainings, and symposia, among other means. Each year, FASPE awards 80 to 90 fellowships to graduate students and early-career professionals in six fields: Business, Clergy & Religious Leaders, Design & Technology, Journalism, Law, and Medicine. Fellowships begin with immersive, site-specific study in Germany and Poland, including at Auschwitz and other historically significant sites associated with Nazi-era professionals. While there, fellows study Nazi-era professionals’ surprisingly mundane and familiar motivations and decision-making as a reflection-based framework to apply to ethical pitfalls in their own lives. We find that the power of place translates history into the present, creating urgency in ethical reflection.
Each month one of our fellows publishes a piece in Memoria. Their work reflects FASPE’s unique approach to professional ethics and highlights the need for thoughtful ethical reflection today.
Akiba Drumer wanted his memory to be sacred. Once the Nazis had marked him for death in a drawn-out “selection,” according to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, Drumer’s last words to his fellow Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz formed
a single request: “In three days I'll be gone [...] Say Kaddish for me.”1
Drumer knew that the Nazis would burn him to ash, in violation of traditional Jewish laws mandating the burial of intact bodies. They had already forcibly shaved and branded him, in opposition to Jewish tradition. These procedures at Auschwitz were the Nazis’ attempt to anonymize all prisoners, to make their powerlessness visible. To observant Jewish prisoners, the practices were also desecrations of their bodies.
So Drumer asked for those who would outlive him to recite Kaddish, a traditional Jewish mourning prayer—his last hope of holy remembrance as he prepared for a death that would be both brutal and sacrilegious.
In Night, Wiesel wrote that he promised Drumer he would recite Kaddish upon seeing “the smoke rising from the chimney” of the crematorium in three days’ time.2 But in Auschwitz, memory rituals were a luxury that prisoners could not often afford. Wiesel confessed that he “forgot” to honor Drumer’s last request amidst the daily beatings, hunger, and crushing workload that governed his life in the concentration camp.3
What would it mean to honor the spirit of Drumer’s request eighty years later? I came to Auschwitz in the summer of 2024with
a variety of goals as both a journalist and
a Jew. I was there to learn about journalistic failures during the Holocaust through FASPE. I secretly hoped that my presence would cause some Nazis to roll over in their carefully marked graves, living proof that their “final solution” had failed. Most of all,
I envisioned my visit to the camp as a perverse kind of pilgrimage, a way to honor the memory of the millions murdered there.
Then I saw the remains of unknowable victims now on display behind glass at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum: locks of their hair, clumps of ashes that were once suffocated corpses, now on permanent view in a tourist-filled room. I wondered how many people had been reduced to those traces of violated bodies. How many would have wanted to be buried? Standing there, I felt like a participant in the victims’ ongoing humiliation.
I was stunned to later learn that some of the most ardent advocates of displaying the remains are or were themselves Holocaust survivors. One staunch defender of the decision was the late Ernest Michel, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, a steward of the museum’s preservation efforts, and
a journalist who reported on the Nuremberg Trials. Referring to the shaved hair on display, Michel told The New Yorker in 1993, “No matter how painful it may be to look at, it is all part of the story that I believe has to be told.”4
Michel might have seen my anger at the ashes and hair at Auschwitz as necessary for an honest reckoning with the Holocaust. He might have seen the public’s shock as a small bit of justice for the Nazis’ victims,
a posthumous recognition of their horrific torture and deaths.
His words echo one of journalism’s loftiest goals: to stare straight at hard truths and tell them widely, especially to those who would rather they be glossed over or ignored.
The decades-long debate over whether to display the bodily remains of Holocaust survivors reflects a recurring dilemma for journalists who document human suffering. The commitment to painful truth-telling that Michel invoked can stand in tension with the spirit of reverence that Drumer requested before he died.
Is it possible to record the full reality of
a tragedy while leaving the dignity of victims and survivors intact?
This question is perhaps hardest to answer when the people most affected—the ones starving in magazine photos, suffocating in body camera footage, or languishing in an urn behind glass—are no longer alive and cannot voice their own wishes.
In my search for perspectives to challenge my initial anger at the display of bodily remains at Auschwitz, I came across the memoir of Mamie Lou Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till. Her words convinced me that prioritizing respect for the dead does not always mean withholding graphic images of their bodies.
When two white adults lynched Till in 1955, Till-Mobley fought for the public to witness her 14-year-old son’s brutalized corpse. His casket, as she wrote in her memoir, was “locked and sealed” when it was delivered to her home city of Chicago. She surmised that “somebody in the state of Mississippi wanted to make sure we didn’t see what was inside that box.”5
Despite the safety risks of such an act of public defiance, Till-Mobley insisted on an open-casket funeral that would make her son’s mutilated body visible. She recalled in her memoir that she wanted to break
a punishing silence around lynching in American culture:
It would be important for people to look at what had happened on a late Mississippi night when nobody was looking, to consider what might happen again if we didn’t look out. This would not be like so many other lynching cases, the hundreds, the thousands of cases where families would be forced to walk away and quietly bury their dead and their grief and their humiliation. I was not going quietly. Oh, no, I was not about to do that [...] The whole nation had to bear witness to this.6
For Till-Mobley, the choice to make her son’s body visible to the world was a way of wresting back some dignity on his behalf. She wanted America to experience his death as
a tragedy rather than a footnote.
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1. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 77.
2. Wiesel, 77.
3. Elie Wiesel, 77.