1. This investigation will avoid the term ‘Holocaust’ and, instead, will employ ‘the Jewish extermination’, ‘the Jewish annihilation’ or similar terms. However, it seems necessary to explain this rationale in more detail, and for this purpose the study of Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman about the word ‘Holocaust’ is highly relevant. They indicate that ‘Holocaust’ comes from the Latin holocaustum, which originally derives from the Greek holokaustos, which means ‘something wholly burnt up’. According to Garber and Zuckerman, before the Second World War, ‘holocaust’ denoted a ‘religious sacrifice’, and after the conflict the elimination of the Jews was referred to as the ‘Nazi Final Solution on the Jewish Question’. Garber and Zuckerman have highlighted that it was the Romanian survivor Elie Wiesel who made this word popular during the 1950s, and the term would become frequently used during the Eichmann trial in 1961 and in the following two decades. Wiesel, as Garber and Zuckerman state, adopted the term with ‘unmistakable religious/sacrificial overtones’ and especially with the notion that the Jews were, like Abraham's son in Genesis 22, the ‘chosen victims’, the ‘only ones’, Israel. Similarly, as Garber and Zuckerman point out, the word ‘Shoah’ comes from biblical Hebrew and means ‘destruction, ruin’. Garber, Z. and Zuckerman, B. (1989) Why do we call the Holocaust ‘The Holocaust’? An inquiry into the psychology of labels. Modern Judaism, 9(2), 198–200. and 202–205. Due to these religious connotations, it seems inconvenient to use the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’. The term ‘Jewish extermination’, on the contrary, avoids a narrow understanding of the destruction of the Jewish population as ‘only’ their physical elimination in Death Camps; the broader meaning that is implied by the term ‘Jewish extermination’ will allow this investigation to take into account more aspects surrounding the event when analysing its perception in Spain. I will, however, use ‘Holocaust representations’ or ‘Holocaust mass media’, for these terms do not define the nature of the annihilation of the European Jews.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12. The testimony of the Blue Division with regard to the Jewish extermination has barely been addressed by historians. I have only recently found a work by Wayne Bowen, which argues that the Blue Division treated the Jews of Suwatki and Grodno (Poland), Novgorod (Russia), and Riga and Vilnius respectfully and even defied Nazi racial policies. Bowen, W. (1998) ‘A great moral victory’: Spanish protection of Jews on the Eastern Front, 1941–1944. In: R. Rohrlich (Ed.) Resisting the Holocaust (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 195–213.Google Scholar

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24. I believe that the word ‘perception’ is more suitable for Spain than ‘memory’, when referring to the place of the Jewish extermination in that country. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘memory’ means ‘the faculty by which things are remembered; the capacity for retaining, perpetuating, or reviving the thought of things’ (Vol. IX, 597), and thus it suggests that the subject's act of remembering is tied to a personal experience. Similarly, ‘remembrance’ indicates ‘memory or recollection in relation to a particular object, fact, etc.’ (Vol. XIII, 586). The most precise term for the purpose of this investigation is ‘perception’, which means ‘the action of the mind by which it refers its sensations to an external object as their cause’ (Vol. XI, 523). J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. (Prep.) (1989) The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn) (Oxford: Clarendon Press). As the first part of this text suggests, Spain's links to the Jewish extermination are limited to certain groups and not to the whole country. For this reason, the most accurate word is ‘perception’, yet in particular cases the term ‘remembrance’ will also be used.Google Scholar

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