Teaching the Shoah to Younger Students

Yesterday in Italy we observed il Giorno della Memoria, aka Holocaust Memorial Day or Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was asked recently why this day exists when we already have Yom HaShoah. My response was that Yom HaShoah is an observance within the Jewish community, when we mourn our families. Perhaps one might say it is like a communal yahrzeit. 

HMD is for all communities of the world, and for all victims of Nazi evil. In my experience, it is much more connected to the concept of memory as an educational tool, which certainly includes paying one's respects to the victims, but really focuses on the more universal aspect of how to fight intolerance and hatred.

Once a week I go to a local state/public school and at the end of the school day I teach 2 hours of English language conversation to 19 children in the First class (c. age 11). They've just finished their first term of regular English lessons in the school, so our vocabulary is a little limited. However, since our weekly lesson fell on the exact date of HMD, with the support of the regular English teacher, we decided to devote yesterday's class to the Shoah.

It was quite a challenge to figure out how to present something appropriate for their age and language skills. But their teacher was quite excited to have me as a resource - I am the first Jew that any of the children have ever met (or, as young G. noted, as far as they know!). We have spent the last couple of lessons learning about family relationships ('niece' & 'nephew' use the same word in Italian as 'grandchildren', i.e., 'nipote'. This has been very confusing for them!), so I decided to tell them the stories of two of my relatives, using their experiences as prompts for further discussion.

The video above is the slideshow/Powerpoint presentation I used as a prompt for our class. V., the regular teacher, sat with us and translated when necessary. Even though this was supposed to be an English lesson, it was important she was there, and I was most grateful.

I think the lesson went quite well. The students had spent the previous 3 hours studying the Shoah, as mandated by the state. And last week I also spent a little time in our class preparing for the discussion. The spectrum of knowledge was broad, ranging from someone who could quote Anne Frank's Diary to someone who didn't know what a Jew was. So we did some basic history. For the main lesson, I had two concerns - how to present the horror without being too horrible, and - and this was the biggie - to address why they need to study this. Why should an 11-year-old kid from Modena care about what happened to an old woman from Chodziez a gazillion years ago?

Nu, you can see in the video how I tried to deal with it all. In very simple English. At the end there are photos of my parents with Otto Frank - I had mentioned a family connection and promised to bring the pics to show them. I thought that would be all, and then I was surprised and touched to be presented with a card that the children had made for me, and some of the pictures they had drawn.

Afterwards I had a quick word with the teacher and offered to work together for next time so that there might be a curriculum for the school. Apparently they got a letter with links to some videos to be watched and the command that creative work such as drawing and writing poems must be encouraged. I would love to help them develop something more structured. There was a positive verbal response, so we shall see ...!

Why it's Important to Remember

the last Red Cross note received from my mother's grandmother, who was murdered in 1942. All that is known is that they went to Riga, then to Stutthof concentration camp. There are no other details on record. Her final message to her daughter expresses joy at the news of her granddaughter's birth. 

Someone on Facebook posted today regarding their feelings about Holocaust Memorial Day. They felt strongly that they did not want to make grief from a dreadful past appear to be the central tenet of contemporary Judaism. They argued that the best way of action is to live a joyous Jewish life, thus making sense out of having survived. I wrote the following in response to that thought:

"This afternoon I shared my previous blogpost with my English language class of 18-year-old Italian young men. The Giorno della Memoria is taken very seriously in Italy. For at least one week beforehand, the television and other media are full of programmes and articles related to it, and there are public events in towns and cities across the land.

In class today I spoke to Alessandro, Singh, Riccardo, Luca, Mohamed, Matteo, Issam and others. I shared a brief version of the short life and cruel death at Buchenwald of my great-uncle Hermann. And then we talked about remembering.

What does it mean to remember? On a personal level, I mourn my family members. Our community mourns its victims. But what are these students of mine supposed to remember? I asked them what they thought. One said, murdered Jews? Ok, I said, Why? They looked puzzled.

It so happens that there was an election here yesterday, and most of these kids didn't vote. I asked them why. Well, the politicians are corrupt, and even if they say they will do what you want, they change their minds after the election. What's the point? I then asked, do you know what important event happened in Germany in 1933? Nobody knew. Someone guessed - did Hitler become Dictator? No! I said. That was when Hitler was democratically elected.

People with extreme views generally vote, I said. Those who decide not to take part leave the field free for such people. And then look what can happen. Hitler got enough power democratically, and then was able to become a dictator. You need to remember this. You need to remember what this can lead to. And you need to remember that it is in your hands to make sure such things cannot happen again.

We are not only grieving the worst thing that humans have ever done. We are witnesses, to help the world remember, so humans do not do it again. So we must remember.

If sharing a little personal remembrance on a national day of memory may help to illustrate the horror in a way that is more tangible than incomprehensible numbers, I will do it.

As for living our tradition joyfully in spite of the Holocaust, that is the other side of the coin. What a gift it is to the world to show that it is possible to live again, to love again, to build lives and families again after such a disaster. For me it goes hand in hand with remembering, rather than choosing between one or the other."

Once the last eyewitness of the Shoah has died, and that time isn't far away, we need to have a good explanation for why the new generations should care about what happened. If they are not Jewish or Roma/Sinti or LGBTQ+ or Communist or connected to any of the most well-known groups that are named when speaking about Nazi persecution, there will be little difference between this historical event and any other throughout history. We need to find a way for this memory to be relevant to all future generations.

When will they realise that remembering what happened, how it all went pear-shaped, will give them vital information for the safety and well-being of their own lives, and their families and their communities. This is work we still need to do. And it begins with telling the story.

I'm (not) a Belieber

So a young Canadian popstar, a boy with millions of fans and the crazy life such attention can bring, has made a comment in the guestbook at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. What he wrote has caused rather a lot of fuss and bother.

The Guardian reports on it here. I'm not a big fan of the lad or his music, but I have to say that I agree with the Indy reporter (here) in that it is a pleasant surprise that this young man took the time to visit the Anne Frank House and show an interest. Indeed, his visit may bring Anne's story to many people who otherwise would never have encountered it.

Meanwhile, if people need something about which to make a fuss, perhaps there are other issues that could use their energy, e.g., how would you like to help children no longer be hungry and die from malnutrition? Check out Live Below the Line for their 2013 initiative here. If this doesn't appeal, I am sure you can find something that does. Ok, preaching over.

a playground in berlin

almost three and a half years ago, germany's official holocaust memorial was opened in berlin, not far from where hitler hid in his bunker as his evil dreams crumbled all around him. here is the ny times report on the opening.

i went to see the memorial a couple of weeks ago. it appeared to be a wonderful place for children to play. you can have a mean game of hide-and-seek among the steles. i also saw many young people jumping from stone to stone. it was an interesting question to consider: what is one supposed to do when visiting this memorial? there is an underground information centre, for which i was not in the mood. there is a small, separate memorial for homosexual victims of the holocaust. and there are these wonky, crooked paths up and down and at all angles and heights that make a grid between the stones. part of me was annoyed that people could be so happy in a place commemorating such evil and misery. part of me was rather happy that there was some joy in such a sad place. i don't know if it is a very good monument, but it is definitely a wonderful playground.

debora's diary

the u.s. holocaust museum has released some pages from the diary of a young woman recording some of her experience in the warsaw ghetto. it is real, and unsanitised, and horrific to read. nevertheless i did. the translation may be found here. its existence was revealed to me by this article in the telegraph. It notes:

"Debora was killed fighting in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, but her diary was recovered from her bombed-out home by her friend Lusia Schwarzwald Hornstein, who only revealed its existence on her deathbed in 1998. She asked that it be donated to the museum, but many of the pages, which cover January 1943 to mid-1944, had either been burnt or were stuck together, making it largely unreadable. But through painstaking work, curators at the museum have managed to transform the blackened fragments into a readable document by submerging it in de-ionised water. This made all the words stand out clearly, meaning they could be photographed and the images handed to a specialist translator."

how to teach about the holocaust

french president nicolas sarkozy courted controversy again this week when he announced that next autumn all french fifth-graders will be required to study the life of one of the 11k french children murdered in the shoah. before one even gets into whether this is an appropriate subject for a 10-year-old, it should first be noted that he appears to have announced this without much, if any, consultation with pretty much anyone who would be involved in the implementation of the idea.

it is currently the policy in france to have a strict separation between church and state. sarkozy is very public about his religious convictions, and has been criticised before about his refusal to separate his personal perspectives from his presidential position.

meanwhile, jews in the community are split in their response. serge klarsfeld, famous nazi-hunter and documentarian of french holocaust victims is reported by the ny times as saying:

"“This is the crowning glory of long and arduous work ... to those who say it’s too difficult for young children — that’s not true. What they see on television or in a horror film is much worse. This is not a morbid mission.”"

on the other hand, simone veil, a famous french survivor, believes:

"“It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust ... You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”"

the whole article is here.

as for my opinion on the matter - the only definitive thing i can say is that i have not yet done enough work on my internalised francophobia to be able to come to any objective conclusions :-)

less facetiously, i really have no idea what is best, and this particular situation seems to be some apples and oranges mixed up together. on the one hand, there is an issue of when and how to teach this aspect of french history. on the other, there is president sarkozy and his political situation, i.e., his actions as president and the response of his opponents and the people that he serves.

holocaust remembrance day

today in europe was the observance of holocaust memorial day. it is still possible to light a candle here. for information about the history of this day, which was instigated originally by the european parliament in 2000, look here.

libby purves posted the following prayer, said to have been found by the body of a dead girl at the ravensbruck camp:

"Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will. Do not remember all the sufferings they have inflicted upon us; remember the fruits we bear, thanks to this suffering – our comradeship, our loyalty, our humanity, courage, generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness."

rutka laskier's diary

reports are coming in of the discovery of the diary of a 14-year-old polish girl called rutka laskier. it was written in early 1943 in the bedzin ghetto, and is being touted as the story of the 'polish anne frank'.

yahoo offers the associated press story here.

"I simply can't believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy," she wrote on Feb. 5, 1943. "The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death."

holocaust deniers in iran

below is a report from the ny times today describing a conference currently being held in iran. call me naive but i am gobsmacked if not flabbergasted that there are people out there who truly believe that the shoah is a myth. where did all my relatives go? o, apparently they all died of typhus, like my uncle bubi who must have caught the disease just before they kicked away the chair and the rope tightened about his neck.

nu - is there anything that can be done about this? ok so maybe you don't care so much about the jews; but if these guys succeed, who is next?

"TEHRAN, Dec. 11 — Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed. In a speech opening the two-day conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, which organized the event, said it was an opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.”

The foreign ministry had said that 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries were scheduled to take part. Among those speaking today are David Duke, the American white-supremacist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader, and Georges Thiel, a French writer who has been prosecuted in France over his denials of the Holocaust. Mr. Duke’s remarks late this afternoon are expected to assert that no gas chambers or extermination camps were actually built during the war, on the ground that killing Jews that way would have been much too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have used much simpler methods, according to an advance summary of his speech published by the institute. “Depicting Jews as the overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war, and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine,” Mr. Duke’s paper says, according to the summary. One of the first scheduled speakers, Robert Faurisson of France, also called the Holocaust a myth created to justify the occupation of Palestine.

The conference is being held at the behest of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who likewise called the Holocaust a myth last year, and repeated a well-known slogan from the early days of the 1979 revolution in Iran, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” He has spoken several times since then about a need to establish whether the Holocaust actually happened.

Most of the speakers at the conference today praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments.

Bendikt Frings, 48, a psychologist from Germany, said he believed Mr. Ahmadinejad was “an honest direct man,” and said he had come to the conference to thank him for what he had initiated. “We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany,” he said. “ All my childhood, we waited for something like this.” Toben Feredrick, from Australia, said Mr. Ahmadinejad has opened an issue “which is morally and intellectually crippling the Western society.” “People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added. Mr. Feredrick said he was jailed for six months in 1999 because of his ideas, and that a court in Germany has ordered him arrested if he speaks out publicly again denying that the Holocaust took place.

Other Western “revisionists” presented what they called new facts about the Holocaust at the conference, which also attracted attendees from some ultra-Orthodox Jews belonging to anti-Zionist sects that reject the state of Israel. One participant wearing the traditional long black coat and hat of such groups wore a badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”

It was not entirely clear how the lineup of speakers at the conference was set. The Institute’s website had invited scholars and researchers to submit papers in advance for consideration, but revealed little about how they were evaluated. The Iranian foreign ministry also provided little information about participants, saying that it feared they would be prosecuted by their home countries.

The conference included an exhibition today of various photos, posters and other material meant to contradict the accepted version of events, that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and other “undesirables” in death camps during the war. New captions in Persian on some familiar photos of corpses at the camps argued that they were victims of typhus, not the German state. Anti-Zionist literature, including a 2004 book by the American author Michael Collins Piper, about Zionist influence in America, was offered for sale to visitors at the conference. So, apparently, was a video recording of 12 Holocaust survivors telling their stories, suggesting that the views represented at the conference may not have been entirely one-sided.

The conference prompted outrage in the West. The German government summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in Berlin to complain. The French Foreign Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned that the conference would be strongly condemned if it propagated claims denying the Holocaust.

Iran also organized an exhibition last summer of cartoons about the Holocaust, which outraged Jews inside Iran and out.

Iranian Jewish leaders reacted angrily to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying comments last year, issuing a statement saying that his words were spreading fear among Jews in Iran. “We consider the Holocaust as a fact and a disgrace for humanity,” Haround Yashayai, a leading voice among Iranian Jews, said today. “We cannot say that such a conference cannot be held here. We have condemned similar events in the past, and see no reason to condemn it again.”"

lessons of the holocaust

today the independent newspaper discusses the pros and cons of a new scheme to take 2 sixth-formers from every school in the united kingdom - more than 6000 students - to visit auschwitz in the next 3 years. the government, and gordon brown in particular, are behind this scheme.

"But not everyone agrees with the idea, arguing that it is an odd use of taxpayers' money - albeit a relatively small amount - and that there are other ways to teach children about atrocities. The critics also complain that it keeps Britain locked in an old-fashioned 60-year-old mindset about Germany and about British relationships with that country when, in reality, they have changed beyond all recognition."

the paper spoke to the head of education at the holocaust educational trust, kay andrews:

"The Holocaust has lessons to teach us today, but Andrews does not resort to the pat exhortation, "never again". He says: "It's lame to say 'never again' because there has been more genocide in the past 60 years, and of course there is still prejudice in the world. But I think learning about the Holocaust can inspire young people to try to make their own little world a better place, by doing something to prevent bullying or prejudice when they see it.""

on the other hand:

"Not everyone, however, agrees that taking students to Auschwitz is the way to put the memory of the Holocaust to use. Some question government backing for a trip to one particular atrocity site. Others say you don't have to physically visit such places. "You don't have to go to Auschwitz to appreciate the horrors of the period," says Professor Frank Furedi, whose mother survived the concentration camps, and who has been critical of the Government's "sanctimonious" approach to the Holocaust before.

"I think that Auschwitz and the camps have come to serve a symbolic purpose as a metaphor for evil in the imagination," he argues. "Learning about the Holocaust has become a rite of passage for schoolchildren. The Government uses it to try to inspire a moral literacy in young people, and I think that's a bad way to go about it. In a time when morality, good and evil are uncertain concepts, there's an impoverishment in using the Holocaust as a standard of good and evil. Atrocities are not the only way to get children to think about morality, or right and wrong. We should look more at good things, at human achievement rather than destruction and catastrophe.""

for me, especially as the time will soon be here when there are no more living witnesses, people need to go to the place and see that it is real. they need to see the ovens, and the piles of spectacles, and the shoes, and everything. if all you do is read about it then it is a lot easier to deny it. of course, i have a vested interest in perpetuating the memory of the shoah, with regard to the influence it had on my family. i hope i also have a vested interest with regard to the development of humanity, in that seeing to what depths human beings may sink will inspire others to defy evil. it's all very well celebrating human achievement, but surely the overcoming of our flaws is the greatest achievement of all?

the independent article was by tim walker