<Table Of Contents

Dignity and Brutality in Journalistic Memory

by Laura Glesby, 2024 Journalism Fellow

Akiba Drumer wanted his memory to be sacred. Once 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 always 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 this summer with a variety of goals as both a journalist and a Jew. I was there to learn about journalistic failures during the time of 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 justice for the Nazis’ victims, a posthumous recognition of their horrific torture and deaths.

His words echo one of journalism’s loftiestgoals: 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, angry reaction 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 recalls 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.

Throughout the summer of 2020, echoes of Till’s murder filled the news as journalists published and republished numerous videos of police murders of Black Americans. These videos ignited mass protests and raised awareness about police brutality. On rare occasions, they led to disciplinary action or criminal convictions of the violent officers.

But the endless stream of police brutality videos in 2020 revealed some of the pitfalls of publicly depicting graphic acts of violence. News outlets rarely represented the victims outside of those moments of pain and death. The public primarily remembered them as helpless and passive. Again and again, their vulnerable experiences became fodder for public consumption.

In a 2020 issue of the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology, Danielle Taylor argued that the public’s appetite for watching these deaths echoes the way lynchings of Black men drew crowds of white onlookers who treated these murders as a form of entertainment.7 It isn’t hard to imagine a white supremacist watching George Floyd’s last breaths with twisted satisfaction; in some police circles, an image of him dying has even become a meme to laugh at.8

Critics have voiced dual concerns about the cumulative psychological impact of so much footage of police brutality. First, the videos can cause secondhand trauma, especially for Black Americans who worry that they or their loved ones might be the next victim to go viral.9 Second, the videos may also desensitize viewers to violence, making police killings of Black people feel normal and even acceptable to much of the public.10

Moral outrage can also be self-serving. Psychologists believe that shock helps us identify with the victim and distance ourselves from the perpetrator.11 This emotion is a way for us to see ourselves as righteous, absolved of the need to question our own complicity.

In her essay, Danielle Taylor does not call for body camera footage to be censored. Rather, she suggests that it is possible to find a middle ground between the competing demands for sacred remembrance and honest truth-telling. “I make a plea,” she wrote, “that we offer these videos more reverence.”12

Witnessing the remains of Auschwitz victims has reminded me of the need for care and intention when considering whether to publish shocking content. While weighing the benefits and drawbacks of putting corpses on display, journalists should consult family members and fellow survivors when possible and consider the cultural context of victims, factoring in widely held beliefs about death and nudity within their communities.

We should also evaluate the likelihood that viewing the corpse will actually inform a public conversation. While footage of a police killing can bring attention to particular tactics such as chokeholds used widely by law enforcement officials, I am not convinced that a pile of ashes adds much to anyone’s understanding of the Holocaust.

Perhaps most importantly, we should make our best effort to depict people as more than just dead bodies. We can pay close attention to the details that made victims of terror and tragedy who they were. After all, their humanity is a critical part of the truth we are obligated to tell. Emmett Till’s first word was “Jell-O” according to Till-Mobley’s memoir. He once tried and failed to teach his mom how to dance the Bunny Hop. He made a habit of steaming his freshly folded laundry on the radiator to get all the wrinkles out.13 Akiba Drumer, as Wiesel remembered him, clung to a belief in divine justice for much of his time in Auschwitz. Drumer, Wiesel wrote, would sing Hasidic melodies and “break our hearts with his deep, grave voice.”14

Had Drumer’s corpse been treated according to Jewish tradition, community members would have ritually cleansed and prepared his body for burial through a process called tahara. At the end of tahara, those involved ask the deceased for mechila, or forgiveness, in case they have unwittingly made a mistake during the ritual.15 Journalists too must acknowledge that harm is inevitable in our work, and that, when we tell sensitive and traumatic stories, we may be making the wrong choices. We can ask for forgiveness from the dead—and for feedback from the living.

Laura Glesby was a 2024 FASPE Journalism Fellow. She is a staff reporter at the New Haven Independent.

Notes

  1. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 77.
  2. Wiesel, 77.
  3. Elie Wiesel, 77.
  4. Timothy Ryback, “Evidence of Evil,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1993, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/11/15/evidence-of-evil.
  5. Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence (New York: Random House, 2003), 133.
  6. Till-Mobley, 139.
  7. Danielle Taylor, “From Lynching to Livestreams: Trauma Porn and the Historic Trivializing of Black Death,” Richmond Journal of Law and Technology, October 2020, https://jolt.richmond.edu/2020/10/14/the-revolution-should-be-cautiously-televised/.
  8. Emma Ockerman, “Cops Keep Getting Accused of Sharing Racist George Floyd Memes,” Vice, February 25, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/cops-keep-getting-accused-of-sharing-racist-george-floyd-memes/.
  9. Kenya Downs, “When black death goes viral, it can trigger PTSD-like trauma,” PBS News, July 22, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/black-pain-gone-viral-racism-graphic-videos-can-create-ptsd-like-trauma.
  10. Jamil Smith, “Videos of Police Killings Are Numbing Us to the Spectacle of Black Death,” The New Republic, April 13, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/121527/what-does-seeing-black-men-die-do-you and Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson, “Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others,” Psychological Science 20, no. 3 (2009): 273-277.
  11. Zachary Rothschild and Lucas Keefer, “A Cleansing Fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity,” Motivation and Emotion 41, no. 2 (2017): 209-229, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9601-2.
  12. Taylor.
  13. Till-Mobley, 26 and 64-68.
  14. Wiesel, 45.
  15. “Shmirah and Taharah,” Kavod v’Nichum, https://kavodvnichum.org/taharah-shmirah/.