Abstract: The paper is devoted to the presentation of the results of a research survey, the aim of which was to find out the opinions of teachers who were professionally working at the first level of primary schools at the time of the quantitative research survey. A total of 319 primary school first cycle teacher education students, 300 females and 19 males, participated in the study at different stage I of their studies. A certain limit to the inclusion of these events in teaching at all levels of institutional education, from our point of view, is the concern of educators about the reaction of the pupils’ legal representatives. We are convinced that, with appropriately chosen methods and forms of teaching, the Shoah can be implemented in the teaching of the first level of primary schools through methods that lead to the de-abstraction of this phenomenon. In most cases in favor of integrating the Shoah phenomenon into teaching at the first level of primary schools, especially through authentic artistic creations of children.
IMPACT STATEMENT
The paper is devoted to the presentation of the results of a research investigation conducted among 319 students of teaching for the first stage of primary schools. The evaluation of the questionnaires shows that most issues are included in the eighth grade of primary school, in the subject of History, which is predestined by its content to integrate events anchored in history. The subjects of Civic Education and Czech Language and Literature also scored significantly. Positive responses were received, while Education in European and Global Contexts, Education for Democratic Citizenship and Multicultural Education were among the cross-cutting themes.
Abstract: Holocaust heritage across Europe is held to high standards of conservation, management, interpretation, and use, due to the belief that all such sites should be retained as or turned into places of memorialization as their primary function. This paper proposes that a pragmatic approach instead be taken towards Holocaust heritage in the twenty-first century and beyond. In acknowledgement that heritage practitioners today are not safeguarding this as a “found” heritage resource in 1945, but in the present day, it is argued that it is inevitable and perhaps unavoidable to make pragmatic decisions which take into account changes to such sites over the last 80 years. Site managers and other stakeholders are not in a position to make decisions based on a clean slate, devoid of post-war events and uses. Drawing on case studies from Serbia and Czechia, and adopting a three-pronged model of “heritage pragmatics,” this paper argues that our choices today should reflect and acknowledge past uses and aim towards more pragmatic solutions, letting go of idealistic aspirations more suitable for sites without a long history of reuse.
Abstract: The Holocaust is the Philoktetes wound tormenting every European country occupied by Hitler’s armies between 1939 and 1945. Paradoxically, it may be the Germans who feel this pain the least, as they have nowhere left to escape the curse of their role as perpetrators. This article presents the results of research on the memory of the events in Hungary, the last theatre of Hitler’s European campaign against the Jews. The researchers returned to the sites of the drama that unfolded in the summer of 1944, searching for traces of the vanished Jewish life in both the physical and social-psychological spaces, where the void created by the destruction of the Jews is filled with fear, distrust, confusion, silence, and cognitive dissonance. Based on the research findings, it can be stated that 80 years after the Holocaust, in Hungarian villages, small towns, and Budapest, both within and outside the current national borders, today, in Macbeth’s words, “nothing is, but what is not”.
Abstract: ‘Het was prachtig zoals de wielen van de wagons in het begin in Nederland rolden …’ aldus een trotse Adolf Eichmann, het organisatorische meesterbrein achter de deportaties van de joden uit de door nazi-Duitsland bezette gebieden naar de vernietigingskampen, enkele jaren na de oorlog. Hij had alle reden tevreden te zijn. In geen enkel ander West-Europees land werd zo’n groot deel van de joodse bevolking weggevoerd en vermoord, en dat had ook te maken met de medewerking van veel Nederlandse instanties. Een harde en pijnlijke waarheid, die velen in Nederland aanvankelijk niet onder ogen wilden zien. In dit boek worden geschetst hoe Nederland met de herinnering aan de Jodenvervolging is omgegaan, vanaf de eerste jaren na de bevrijding tot aan de opening van het Nationaal Holocaust Museum in 2024. Opvallend daarbij is dat de nazistische vervolging in Nederland al in de jaren zestig een belangrijke plaats kreeg in de nationale herinneringscultuur, vooral dankzij het Eichmann-proces en het werk van Jacques Presser. Het nationalistische beeld van de oorlog als een periode van ‘onderdrukking en verzet’, waarin de Jodenvervolging in de eerste plaats werd gezien als een illustratie van de Duitse terreur tegen het Nederlandse volk, bleek niet langer houdbaar. Vanaf de jaren negentig zou Nederland steeds meer onder invloed raken van de internationale herinneringscultuur die zich vormde rond het begrip ‘Holocaust’, een term die aanvankelijk buiten de VS geheel onbekend was. Dat proces laat zich goed aflezen aan het taalgebruik en de herdenkingsrituelen, maar ook aan monumenten, musea, media, film en literatuur. Rond de Holocaust ontstond een soort ‘burgerlijke religie’, die niet alleen politiek wordt beleden, in Europa, de VS en andere delen van de wereld, maar ook diep geworteld is in de cultuur en samenleving, te beginnen in Nederland. Nederland en de herinnering aan de Jodenvervolging biedt een diepgravend overzicht van de omgang met de herinneringen aan de meest pijnlijke en ingrijpende episode uit de moderne Nederlandse geschiedenis. Frank van Vree is em. hoogleraar Geschiedenis van Oorlog, Geweld en Herinnering aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Eerder was hij directeur van het NIOD en decaan van de Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen van de UvA. Hij publiceerde een groot aantal studies op het terrein van de moderne geschiedenis en historische cultuur.
Abstract: Hatred of Jews noticed a dramatic rise after the events of October 7, 2023. Since Holocaust education was presented for years as the answer to the hatred of Jews, the question almost automatically occurs: Has Holocaust education failed? Does it need to be revised or totally reorganized? How do things differently in the future? How can Holocaust education contribute to combating hatred of Jews? The German Holocaust education expert and historian, Dr. Melanie Carina Schmoll, PhD, provides answers to these questions. This book teaches academics and practitioners why and what to expect when teaching about the Holocaust. Content, outcome of Holocaust education, gaps in knowledge and the reasons for are examined. In comprehensible explanations, Dr. Schmoll shows the potential failures in Holocaust education and why the teaching of history still matters. Hatred of Jews-A Failure of Holocaust Education? bridges the gap between academic research and practical support for educators, teachers, and textbook publishers. A step-by-step guide helps on how to improve it in the future.
Abstract: In all, 90% of Polish Jews, more than 3 million people, were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and 90% of the survivors left Poland. The survivors and their heirs, most of them not currently living in Poland, saw their land confiscated by the Nazis, nationalized by the communists and reprivatized and sold to others. Poland is the only country in the EU not to have a comprehensive restitution law. The issue of land restitution is still present in current debate in Poland, as part of a broader discussion over the Second World War, communism, privatization and corruption. While Poland blocked all restitution claims in 2021, Jewish communities as well as other governments called Poland to adopt a comprehensive restitution law for everyone. Now, 30 years after the fall of communism, what justifies such claims? This paper argues that forward-looking collective responsibility is the most helpful concept to understand the Jewish restitution problem in Poland today, and claims that any future settlement of this issue should be based on it. By applying this concept, as developed by Iris Marion Young, to the Polish restitution case, we look into the past – not to look for people to blame, but to look for social connections that have implications for the present. This way, we can remember the past, learn from it and heal relationships between people without being slaves to it.
Abstract: Many young Slovak Jews, belonging to the third post-war generation, learned about their Jewishness only later in their lives, when outer triggers – whether a classmate’s comment or a history lesson about the Holocaust – raised questions to which they received unexpected answers at home. This study focuses on family secrets and their productivity, and on social taboos on information about Jewish descent, in the context of perceived insecurity across three generations of Slovak Jews. Exploring how young people discovered their Jewishness and how it was presented to them by their closest kin – who had previously kept it secret from them – along with the warning not to tell anyone about it, this study shows the formative power of this information for a sense of self, as well as for their relations to others. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Jewish community in Bratislava, the author shows how contemporary young Jews – the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors – navigate their uncovered family secret, and how they negotiate the disruption in the continuity of their life stories and the intergenerational transmission of uncertainty and mistrust, which encourages the use of strategies of careful concealment of “otherness”, affecting their everyday life and relationships.
Abstract: NEW YORK, NEW YORK: January 23, 2025—The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) today released the first-ever, eight-country Index on Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness, exposing a global trend in fading knowledge of basic facts about the Holocaust. The countries surveyed include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania.
The majority of respondents in each country, except Romania, believe something like the Holocaust (another mass genocide against Jewish people) could happen again today. Concern is highest in the United States, where more than three-quarters (76%) of all adults surveyed believe something like the Holocaust could happen again today, followed by the U.K. at 69%, France at 63%, Austria at 62%, Germany at 61%, Poland at 54%, Hungary at 52%, and Romania at 44%.
Shockingly, some adults surveyed say that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust (Shoah) prior to taking the survey. This is amplified among young adults ages 18-29 who are the most recent reflection of local education systems; when surveyed, they indicated that they had not heard or weren’t sure if they had heard of the Holocaust (Shoah): France (46%), Romania (15%), Austria (14%) and Germany (12%). Additionally, while Auschwitz-Birkenau is the most well-known camp, nearly half (48%) of Americans surveyed are unable to name a single camp or ghetto established by the Nazis during World War II.
On a more positive note, there is overwhelming support for Holocaust education. Across all countries surveyed, nine-in-10 or more adults believe it is important to continue teaching about the Holocaust, in part, so it does not happen again.
Abstract: This paper, intended as a contribution to transnational memory studies, analyzes museums devoted to people who helped Jews during the Holocaust that recently opened in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland. The author’s particular interest lies in the “traveling motifs” of the “Righteous” narratives. This category encompasses symbols such as a list of names of the help-providers, a fruit tree/orchard, or a wall with photographs of Holocaust victims, which recur in many of the examined exhibitions and are a clear reference to Yad Vashem and other well-established Holocaust memorials. At first sight, they seem to point to a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust remembrance and to the emergence of a common reservoir of historical notions and images. However, on closer inspection one discovers that the use of these symbols varies and that they refer to differing ways of understanding and telling history.
Abstract: In August 1945, a small group of Jewish industrialists was tried in absentia by the military court in Maribor, Yugoslavia. They were convicted of “war crimes” and sentenced to confiscation of property. Part of the nationalization policies of the new Communist government, the episode related to specifically Jewish experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. Subsequent legal cases seeking redress involved agencies of Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Great Britain, the United States, and post-1991 Slovenia over several decades. This article reconstructs the sources, circumstances, and complex consequences of the legal cases in order to uncover structural and ideological factors underpinning the repeated failures of Jewish survivor claims. It sheds light on the memory wars shaping political life in Eastern Europe today, and it sharpens understandings that should facilitate efforts towards restitution of Jewish property.
Abstract: This book addresses the issues of memory (a more suitable word would be Marianne Hirsh’s term of postmemory) of the Holocaust among young Poles, the attitudes towards Jews and the Holocaust in the comparative context of educational developments in other countries. The term “Jews” is, as rightly noted Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (2010) a decontextualized term used here in the meaning of Antoni Sułek (2010) as a collective “symbolic” entity. The focus was on education (transmitting values), attitudinal changes and actions undertaken to preserve (or counteract) the memory of Jews and their culture in contemporary Poland. The study to which the book primarly refers was conducted in 2008 and was a second study on a national representative sample of Polish adolescents after the first one undertaken in 1998. The data may seem remote from the current political situation of stepping back from the tendency to increase education about the Holocaust which dominated after 1989 and especially between 2000 and 2005, nonetheless they present trends and outcomes of specific educational interventions which are universal and may set examples for various geopolitical contexts.
The focus of this research was not primarily on the politics of remembrance, which often takes a national approach, although state initiatives are also brought to the attention of the reader, but rather on grassroots action, often initiated by local civil society organizations (NGOs) or individual teachers and/or students. This study has attempted to discover the place that Jews have (or do not have) in the culture of memory in Poland, where there lived the largest Jewish community in pre-war Europe, more than 90% of which was murdered during the Holocaust. The challenge was to show the diversity of phenomena aimed at integrating Jewish history and culture into national culture, including areas of extracurricular education, often against mainstream educational policy, bearing in mind that the Jews currently living in Poland are also, in many cases, active partners in various public initiatives. It is rare to find in-depth empirical research investigating the ensemble of areas of memory construction and the attitudes of youth as an ensemble, including the evaluation of actions (programmes of non-governmental organisations and school projects) in the field of education, particularly with reference to the long-term effects of educational programmes. The assumption prior to this project was that the asking of questions appearing during this research would stimulate further studies.
The book is divided into three parts: Memory, Attitudes and Actions. All three parts of the book, although aimed at analysing an ongoing process of reconstructing and deconstructing memory of the Holocaust in post-2000 Poland, including the dynamics of the attitudes of Polish youth toward Jews, the Shoah and memory of the Shoah, are grounded in different theories and were inspired by various concepts. The assumption prior to the study was that this complex process of attitudinal change cannot be interpreted and explained within the framework on one single academic discipline or one theory. Education and the cultural studies definitely played a significant role in exploring initiatives undertaken to research, study and commemorate the Holocaust and the remnants of the rich Jewish culture in Poland, but the sociology, anthropology and psychology also played a part in helping to see this process from various angles.
