ROGER RYAN'S
HOLOCAUST RESEARCH
London, Israel, Poland, Germany, Lithuania and
Washington DC
© The PCC of St Mary's Summerstown

March 2011
Ten days in Auschwitz for
research, study and reflection staying at the
Centre for Prayer and Dialogue in Oświęcim


Auschwitz I


A cold morning at Auschwitz-Birkneau


The site of E715 the Auchwitz working camp for
British and Commonwealth POWs 1943-1945
- today, just a field

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SABBATICAL
May, June and July 2010
time-off from parish duties in order to
travel, research, read, study, reflect, write and rest.
My three aims were:
• to further my research project on Charles Coward,
• to study Holocaust Theology, and
• to consider the vast amount of suffering and injustice we see around us in the world—which from time to time threatens to overwhelm
faith communities—in order to consider
the wider question,
‘Where is God in all this?’
My weekly programme was as follows...

May
Week 1: Munich, Germany:
research in the archives of the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte
(Institute for Contemporary History) and 
a day visit to the Munich Jewish Museum.
Week 2: Church Society Conference at High Leigh and
a day at the Christian Resources Exhibition.
Week 3: Reading week at the Sheldon Centre, Devon.
Week 4. Reading week at home

June
Week 1: A week at St Deinol's residential library,
Hawarden, North Wales: a biblical studies course and two days reading in the library
Week 2: Reading week at home and attending a day conference on The Holocaust and Modern Genocide
at The British Academy
Weeks 3 & 4: Two weeks on holiday in France in
Dinan and Dinard for Pauline to have the
opportunity to improve her French


'Bonjour' Looking not unlike a Frenchman in order to 
blend in with the people of Dinan

Ferry from Dinard to St Malo

Week 5: Reading week at home and a day at the
International Genocide Conference 
University of Sussex

July
Week 1: Washington DC:
research week in the archives of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum


With researcher Joe White in a heat wave outside USHMM
The poster reads:
'The Next time you witness hatred,
the next time you see injustice,
the next time you hear about genocide,
THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU SAW' 

Weeks 2, 3 & 4: During the last three weeks of July I was
mainly reading and writing at home.
I visited a World War II ex-prisoner of war in the Midlands in order to hear his story and I also
spent two days at the summer meeting of
The Society for Old Testament Study at the
University of Sheffield

British Heroes of the Holocaust
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Lunch at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
followed by a Reception at 10 Downing Street
at the invitation of the Prime Minister and
Her Majesty's Government

28 British citizens who through extraordinary and courageous acts, helped to save Jews and others in the Holocaust were presented with medals.
Most were posthumous awards recieved by families,
the two surviving recipients were 
Sir Nicholas Winton and Mr Denis Avey

Charles Coward's family received his posthumous award.
I was invited to attend with his daughter, Mrs Linda Clarke, her husband Barry and their daughter Emma



I was pleased to have the opportunity to present to the Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown, a copy of my MA research dissertation on Charles Coward (see below)

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Poland 2009:
Following in the Footsteps of
Felix Opatowski
(Warsaw, Lodz, Katowice, Krakow and Auschwitz)

In September 2009 I joined Felix Opatowski's Holocaust tour with Pastor Rudy Fidel of Faith Temple in Winnipeg, a group of Canadians and a film crew following Felix's movements in the 1940s from the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz

Felix is an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor


Auschwitz prisoner number 143425


The group from Canada at the Auschwitz Museum

The aim of the tour was for Felix to tell his story to us and on camera in order to make a documentary for television and a DVD to draw attention to his forthcoming book (2011) and to attract funding for a feature film


Felix and his wife Regina at his birth place in Lodz from where he was taken by the Nazis by force to
the Lodz ghetto with his family


We discovered Felix's name in a 1941 Lodz transport list in the archive of The Radegast Station Monument of the Annihilation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto
showing he was taken by the Nazis, with others, to a labour camp at Rawicz


Felix at the Auschwitz work gate


Explaining his work as an Auschwitz
slave-labourer in 1944


Szymon Kowalski, Archivist, Auschwitz Museum
Pastor Rudy Fidel, Faith Temple, Winnipeg
Felix Opatowski, Auschwitz survivor.
We also discovered Felix's name in the Auschwitz museum archive in two concentration camp lists
both dated 1944


Felix at the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau
gas chamber and crematorium 4 which was destroyed in
the prisoner uprising on October 7, 1944


Felix standing in the ruins of barrak 24 where he was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944


Felix and me sitting in the shade on a hot afternoon at Auschwitz-Birkenau


Auschwitz:
a place of terror and dread

'Following in the Footsteps of Felix Opatowski' was an outstanding educational tour which complemented what I had recently heard in lectures, read in scholarly accounts and presented in essays in an MA course on the Holocaust at University College London (see below)

Felix is an honourable man who told his story
with dignity, warmth and humour even though he did not spare us the horror of it all as his past came to mind in places where it happened to him and
his family over 60 years ago

The Canadians left Poland for Vienna with
Felix and Regina.
I stayed on in Auschwitz for three days to visit the museum, to join a museum tour and 
to meet with researchers

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I also visited  the Commonwealth War Graves in
the Rakowicki Cemetry in Krakow to view the grave of
Corporal Leslie Verdun Reynolds, age 27,
a British POW in Auschwitz working camp E715 who was murdered by a German guard on 23 February 1944
at the IG Farben synthetic rubber and petrol-chemical factory

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LONDON UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF HEBREW AND JEWISH STUDIES FIELD TRIP TO LITHUANIA
(June 2008)

Roger (second right), Professor Berkowitz (far right)

Part-time MA in ‘Holocaust Studies’
Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies
University College London
(2007-2009)

My aim has been to study the history of the Holocaust/Shoah by attending lecture courses and seminars, reading and submitting scholarly essays and a dissertation as an MA student in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of London.
   The two year course has provided a link between my recent doctorate on the Book of Judges—submitted to the University of Oxford in 2005 followed by the publication of my commentary on Judges published by Sheffield Phoenix Press (2007)—and my proposed informal study program from September 2009 of reading and reflection about ‘Holocaust Theology’ under the provisional heading, ‘Where is God in all this?’  

The part-time MA consisted of three taught courses, an exam, a graduate seminar, the submission of three short essays, three long essays, a dissertation and a study tour of Lithuania.

The first course in the first year was, ‘European Jewry and the Holocaust’ which traced the origins of antisemitism, Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, the first world war, the rise to power of the Nazis, mass murder of Jews and other persecuted groups, ghettos, concentration camps, death camps, the emergence of the ‘final solution’, and Jewish resistance.
   As well as sitting an exam, I submitted three essays on the experiences of Jews as Germans before 1939, partisan and resistance movements, and the experiences of victims in ghettos and camps.

The second course in the first year was a graduate seminar on the ‘History of the Holocaust’ for which I was required to read recent scholarly historical books and give presentations on what I had read such as those by Doris Bergen, Christopher Browning, Nechama Tec, Marion Kaplan, Inga Clendinnen and others. I submitted a long essay on the motives of perpetrators based on a reading of Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (2006).

‘Bystanders and the Holocaust’ was a half taught course in the second year which traced the responses to the Holocaust of the German people and the responses of countries and governments in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. I submitted a long essay on bystanders in Lithuania, Poland, and France.

The final half taught course in the second year on ‘Modern Jewish Politics from 1800’ covered the Jewish experience in eastern Europe and Russia about the enlightenment, emancipation, assimilation, antisemitism, Jewish political movements and the emergence of the modern State of Israel.
   As a non-Jew I found this course a struggle because I lacked the family and community background, however, I enjoyed reading for the long essay which was about the shift in Jewish communities from traditional to modern politics.
   The relevance of this particular course for me was the insights into Jewish life prior to the Holocaust.

For the dissertation (15,000 words), I made a historical and scholarly investigation into what I was able to discover about Battery Sergeant Major Charles Coward, a British prisoner of war who assisted Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz while he was held in working camp E715 in 1944.
   I also made an evaluation of the 'John Castle' historical novel, The Password is Courage (1954), which is about Mr Coward’s wartime experiences and provisionally concluded that the book was reliable in outline.
   Charles Coward died in 1976; he was a modest man, an altruist who was embarrassed to be thought of as a hero.

The MA course also included a four day field trip to Lithuania (June 2008) to visit sites and memorials of the mass slaughter of Jews. Our guide took us to the sites of the Kovno and Vilnius ghettos, mass burial sites in the Ponar forest, the Seventh Fort, the Ninth Fort, and the forest hiding places of partisans.
   Even though this was no holiday and the subject matter was grim, we dined well, drank a little and laughed a lot.
   This was an outstanding tour which complemented what I had heard in lectures, read in scholarly accounts and presented in essays.

I am grateful to Sion College and to the Ian KartenTrust for 
grants towards fees and books which have made my participation possible in this very demanding but rewarding course of academic study. I am also grateful to Professor Michael Berkowitz for his insight, advice and support. I am able to report that neither the congregation of St Mary’s nor the parishioners of Summerstown were neglected by their vicar during the duration of the course.

From September 2009 I hope to continue as a part-time honorary research associate in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in order to make an informal study of ‘Holocaust Theology’ for which my recent studies has been a preparation. Research on Charles Coward continues for a forthcoming publication.

My long term goal is to compare the problematic genocide text in Judges 21.8-12 with what I have learnt about the Holocaust and with the vast amount of suffering and injustice we see around us in the world—which from time to time threatens to overwhelm faith communities—in order to consider the question, ‘Where is God in all this?’

Visiting the Ponar Forest, Lithuania

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Attending a ten-day seminar at Yad Vashem,
The International School for Holocaust Studies (April 2007)

 
At the River Jordan (April 2007)
(Photograph by Amier Golani, Israel Antiquities Authority)


At the Mount of Olives (April 2007)

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I conclude with a happy family photograph...
my grandaughter Bettie, age just one year in October 2009