Professor’s lecture discusses prevalence of looting

With a focus on the use of humans for soap, Professor Bozena Shallcross of the University of Chicago presented a lecture titled “A Holocaust Object and the Story of Its Production” on Monday in Ballantine Hall Monday.

Shallcross’s lecture was based on a chapter from her book “The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture,” which was released in January by Indiana University Press.

She said her intent with the book was to investigate how people who lived through the Holocaust talked about looting.

“The ultimate appropriation (was) the recycling of the body for all sorts of products,” Shallcross said.

Shallcross began by discussing literature and analyzing Polish novelist Zofia Nalkowska’s work.

Nalkowska, who became a member of the Committee for Research of German Crimes in 1945, visited a laboratory in Danzig where Nazi Physician Rudolf Spanner had produced soap from human fat.

Nalkowska said she felt a “confused sensation” that something was terribly wrong with the place, Shallcross said, but it was not fully realized until she came across “piles of corpses with neat cuts on the necks.”

“She (Nalkowska) strives to find an adequate strategy to present the morbid spectacle,” Shallcross said.

The Nazis, such as Spanner, she said, attempted to turn bodies completely into soap until “nothing human” was left.

However, the smell revealed the soap to be human.

“Professor Spanner tried hard to get rid of the smell. He wrote away to chemical factories for oils, but you could always tell the soap was different,” said a lab assistant of Spanner’s whom Shallcross quoted.

“Of all the Holocaust recyclings, this one failed,” Shallcross said.

Historically, soap has been a “yardstick of civilization,” but the use of humans “perverts the main trope of civilization,” Shallcross said.

Shallcross covered history, theories of utilitarianism and essentialism and Freudian thought. In medieval times, she said, any group considered to be the “other” was deemed a “candidate for sacrifice.”

Graduate student Charles Bonds said he has studied the Holocaust for a long time as a Yiddish and Russian student, and that while it is horrifying he believes studying the topic furthers people’s understanding.

“A real depth could be uncovered in studying this,” Bonds said. “It needs to be uncovered, absorbed, felt and studied.”