Teaching about the holocaust

• Author: Miriam Ben-Yoseph

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Introduction

Many would agree that teaching about the Holocaust is not like teaching about anything else. As Elie Wiesel (1978) put it: AHow do you teach about events that defy knowledge, experiences that go beyond imagination? How do you tell children, big and small, that society could lose its mind and start murdering its own soul and its own future? How do you unveil horrors without offering at the same time some measure of hope? Hope in what? In whom? In progress, in science and literature and God?@

The longer I teach about the Holocaust, the more questions I have about it. Should the Holocaust be viewed as a major event in Jewish history, or as one of a number of similar historical examples of genocide? Adolf Hitler was essential to the Holocaust, but he could not have done it by himself. So, who participated in the Holocaust and what was the nature of their participation? Were women's experiences of the Holocaust different from those of men? Should Holocaust denial literature be incorporated into the teaching of the Holocaust? Since the Holocaust is considered by many the ultimate manifestation of homelessness and nonbelonging (Magat, 2000) what does home mean? What can be learned from the memoralization of the Holocaust in various parts of the world? In addition to the problem of what to teach, there is always the issue of how to teach. The purpose of this article is to address these questions. Special emphasis will be placed on teaching methodologies.

Background and Experience

After many years of silence during which researchers and teachers avoided the subject of the Holocaust, the number of scholarly works and courses devoted to it have grown significantly. With the increase of racial, ethnic, political and religious hatred , the interest in the Holocaust is growing as we continue to learn from the Holocaust and other more current examples of human cruelty (Mitchell &Mitchell, 2001). This article is an addition to the growing body of work that examines the why, what and how of teaching the Holocaust. Given that my work connects interdisciplinary, international, collaborative and experiential approaches, it should be of interest to scholars and teachers in many disciplines.

One of my earliest childhood memories has to do with the Holocaust. I was convinced that if I tried hard enough, I could erase the number tattooed on my aunt=s arm. Of course that was not possible, but it gave me and my aunt the opportunity to begin talking about her experience in Auschwitz. I was eager to learn more about the Holocaust, but the educational system in Romania at the time I lived and went to school there did not provide many opportunities in this regard. After my mother and I immigrated to Israel, I learned more about the Holocaust in history classes in high school but I was surprised by the general attitude of my classmates towards this topic. Most of them seemed to disassociate themselves not only from the perpetrators and bystanders (which I would have found understandable) but also from the victims. They likened Jewish victims to Asheep led to slaughter@ and had a hard time identifying with them (Segev, 1993). This attitude changed over the years, but I did not have the opportunity to observe it first hand. My most significant learning about the Holocaust occurred in the United States. I was thrilled when my colleague John Kordek asked me to teach collaboratively about the Holocaust. John is a former U.S. Ambassador and career foreign service officer who joined DePaul University just about the time I started teaching there.

Significance of the Work

The history of the Holocaust represents one of the most effective subjects for an examination of basic moral issues. An inquiry into the history of the event provides vital lessons for an investigation of human behavior as well. A study of the Holocaust also addresses one of the main tenets of American education, which is to examine what it means to be a responsible citizen.

The course I teach combines a study of the Holocaust with a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the nation=s official memorial to the Holocaust. Participants tour the permanent exhibition at the Museum, visit the Wexler Learning Center which is a computer database of facts and data relating to the Holocaust, and then participate in a seminar with several Museum and Holocaust experts. At DePaul, we focus on major events leading to the Holocaust and study the groups central to any analysis of the Holocaust: perpetrators...