Abstract: Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings brings together a group of international experts to investigate the relationship between Holocaust remembrance and different types of educational activity through consideration of how education has become charged with preserving and perpetuating Holocaust memory and an examination of the challenges and opportunities this presents.
The book is divided into two key parts. The first part considers the issues of and approaches to the remembrance of the Holocaust within an educational setting, with essays covering topics such as historical culture, genocide education, familial narratives, the survivor generation, and memory spaces in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. In the second part, contributors explore a wide range of case studies within which education and Holocaust remembrance interact, including young people’s understanding of the Holocaust in Germany, Polish identity narratives, Shoah remembrance and education in Israel, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in South Africa, and teaching at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
Table of Contents
Series editors’ foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Education, remembrance, and the Holocaust: towards pedagogic memory-work
Andy Pearce
Part I: Issues, approaches, spaces
1. Lessons at the limits: on learning Holocaust history in historical culture
Klas-Göran Karlsson
2. The anatomy of a relationship: the Holocaust, genocide, and education in Britain
Andy Pearce
3. Väterliteratur: remembering, writing, and reconciling the familial past
Carson Phillips
4. Memories of survivors in Holocaust education
Wolf Kaiser
5. Figures of memory at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Michael Bernard-Donals
6. Imperial War Museums: reflecting and shaping Holocaust memory
Rachel Donnelly
7. Beyond learning facts: teaching commemoration as an educational task in German memorials sites for the victims of National Socialist crimes
Martin Schellenberg
Part II: National perspectives, contexts, and case studies
8. Hitler as a figure of ignorance in young people's incidental accounts of the Holocaust in Germany
Peter Carrier
9. Who was the victim and who was the saviour? The Holocaust in Polish identity narratives
Mikołaj Winiewski, Marta Beneda, Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, and Marta Witkowska
10. Conveying the message of Holocaust survivors: Shoah remembrance and education in Israel
Richelle Budd Caplan and Shulamit Imber
11. Holocaust education in the US: a pre-history, 1939–1960
Thomas D. Fallace
12. The Presence of the past: creating a new Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in post-Apartheid South Africa
Tali Nates
13. Educational bridges to the intangible: an Australian perspective to teaching and learning about the Holocaust
Tony Joel, Donna-Lee Frieze, and Mathew Turner
14. Myths, misconceptions, and mis-memory: Holocaust education in England
Stuart Foster
Abstract: Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust education which were introduced as conditions of membership for access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand how individuals take up transnational policies and programs intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building, civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived power of the international community in dictating domestic education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, education, history, political science, and European studies.
Abstract: British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation’s changing religious-secular landscape.
In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of ‘British values’. In the book’s second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain’s 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination.
Abstract: Cet ouvrage dirigé par Jacques et Ygal Fijalkow découle du colloque qui s'est tenu en 2011 à Lacaune sur le thème des voyages de mémoire de la Shoah (colloque soutenu par la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah). Enseignants, personnels des musées mémoriaux, témoins de la Shoah, acteurs institutionnels, experts et universitaires y livrent leurs regards et leurs analyses sur les voyages d'étude sur la Shoah.
Enseigner la Shoah n’est pas chose facile. Tous les enseignants le savent. Dans le souci de développer des formes nouvelles d’enseignement, certains ont trouvé une solution : sortir de la classe et aller avec leurs élèves sur des lieux de mémoire. Cette façon de faire, dans un contexte de développement des voyages en général, est en plein développement.Du côté des pouvoirs publics, la formule a plu et les soutiens arrivent de sorte que le nombre de voyages augmente d’année en année. Le succès aidant, un débat est né : qu’apportent véritablement ces voyages de mémoire aux élèves qui y participent ?
C’est sur cette toile de fond que cet ouvrage a été rédigé. On y trouvera des éclairages sur ce qu’apportent les institutions spécialisées dans ce domaine. On pourra y voir également comment les choses se passent, aussi bien lors de la préparation que sur les lieux de mémoire eux-mêmes. Et ceci en France mais aussi chez nos voisins anglais, belges, espagnols, italiens, suisses, ainsi qu’en Israël. Le cas d’Auschwitz est privilégié, mais d’autres lieux sont également examinés.
Abstract: Restitution for the mostly Jewish property and assets that were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II (WWII) in various European states has been a highly debated issue ever since the end of the war. Countries that adhered to the ideas of communism and nationalisation of property in the immediate aftermath of the war failed to address this issue until very recently. Serbia, too, has only began to consider remedying the incredible damage done to its rather small Jewish community. More specifically, in the past decade, Serbia has been trying to repair the damage by passing a series of restitution laws which eventually led to separate legislation on heirless property. This paper explores the substance and application of these laws, as well as the history of discrimination based on which the Serbian Jewish community was persecuted by German occupiers and their collaborators. In doing so, through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), this paper identifies another group that has been persecuted on the basis of race, namely the Romani. What follows from such research is the following: firstly, the law allowed for discrimination on a racial basis of both Jews and Roma during WWII and, secondly, the law is now remedying the damages caused towards the former group, but not the latter. In conclusion, this paper suggests that such a distinction is made due to a possible interest convergence, as defined by CRT.
Abstract: Auschwitz, Holokaust, antysemityzm...
Te trzy słowa symbole ewokują całą listę pytań badawczych. Czym jest dzisiaj dla nas - mieszkańców Polski - Auschwitz? Jaką wiedzę na temat obozu posiadamy, zwłaszcza czy wiemy, że Żydzi stanowili największą grupę ofiar? Czego symbolem jest dla nas – Polaków – Auschwitz, szczególnie czy jest raczej symbolem polskiego męczeństwa, czy żydowskiego Holokaustu? Jaki jest stosunek Polaków do Żydów? Jak szeroko rozpowszechniony i jak głęboki jest antysemityzm w Polsce, w jej różnych regionach i środowiskach? Czy mamy do czynienia z jednego rodzaju antysemityzmem czy z różnymi antysemityzmami? Co o Auschwitz, Zagładzie i Żydach wiedzą i sądzą młodzi Polacy? Jak efektywne są rozmaite działania edukacyjne i informacyjne dotyczące Zagłady i Auschwitz? Jaki skutek odniosły debaty o stosunkach polsko-żydowskich wywołane publikacją książek Jana Tomasza Grossa? Jakie doświadczenie wizyty w miejscach pamięci, takich jak Auschwitz, Majdanek czy Treblinka, zmienia myślenie młodych? Czy wzrost wiedzy o Zagładzie i Auschwitz zmienia postawy, zwłaszcza czy eliminuje antysemityzm?
Niniejszy tom zawiera artykuły, w których podjęto próbę udzielenia odpowiedzi na te pytania.
Abstract: Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
Abstract: Jede Vertreibung, Migration oder Flucht hinterlässt ihre Spuren in den Biografien der betroffenen Individuen und in der Geschichte ihrer Familien.
Psychosoziale Dienste berichten demzufolge, dass eine stetig wachsende Zahl von ratsuchenden Shoah-Überlebenden und deren Angehörige unter psychischen Problemen leidet, die mit ihren migrationsbedingten Erfahrungen in einen Zusammenhang gestellt werden können.
Unter welchen Umständen und mit welcher Intensität sich einschneidende biografische Erfahrungen traumatisierend und mit auffälligen Symptomen auswirken, hängt sowohl von der Persönlichkeitsstruktur und den affektiven Reaktionsmustern des Individuums ab als auch von den gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen des Landes, in dem sich die Betreffenden niederließen, um einen biografischen Neuanfang zu wagen.
Die vorliegende Dokumentation versammelt die zentralen Beiträge einer internationalen Konferenz, auf der unterschiedliche Narrative und historische Rahmenbedingungen der verschiedenen Flucht- und Migrationswellen von jüdischen Überlebenden der Shoah nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg aufgearbeitet und deren Auswirkungen auf die aktuellen Lebensbedingungen im Alter beleuchtet wurden.
Aus dem Inhalt
Gad Arnsberg Wer sind wir? Die Vielfalt jüdischen Selbstverständnisses in Deutschland nach 1945. Ein historischer Überblick | Jens Hoppe Erfahrungen von deutschen Juden, die die NS-Verfolgung in Deutschland oder im Exil überlebt haben. Eine historische Einbettung | Hans Jakob Ginsburg Doppelte Fremde: Jüdische Zuwanderer aus Osteuropa in der Bundesrepublik nach 1945 | Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber Leben nach der Shoah: Psychoanalytische Überlegungen ausgehend von der Autobiografie des Psychoanalytikers und Traumaforschers Henri Parens | Gerda Netopil und Klaus Mihacek Psychotrauma im Alter. Eine Analyse des psychosozialen Modells ESRA | Amit Shrira Altern im Schatten transgenerativer Weitergabe der Holocaust-Erfahrungen | Julia Bernstein Multiple Traumatisierung ex-sowjetischer Juden vor und nach der Immigration | Martin Auerbach, Elise Bittenbinder und Lukas Welz Ein Zwiegespräch über Trauma, Flucht und Migration gestern und heute als Fortführung des Dialogs aus dem „PresentPast“-Projekt von AMCHA | Esther Weitzel-Polzer Chaos und Muster. Die Entwicklung einer transkulturellen Organisation am Beispiel eines jüdischen Altenpflegeheims in Deutschland | Andrea Schiff Stolpersteine im Umgang mit traumatisierten alten Menschen. Pflegewissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse für die Pflegepraxis | Jim Sutherland Shoah, Flucht und Migration aus britischer Perspektive. Die Arbeit des Vereins Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) | Sara Soussan „Ehre Vater und Mutter“ — Der Anspruch des fünften Gebots im Spannungsfeld von Altwerden, Krankwerden und Verletztwerden | Doron Kiesel „Schnee von gestern“ — ein Film von Yael Reuveny | Christian Wiese Einsichten und Erkenntnisse
Abstract: Silence appears frequently in discourses of the Holocaust – as a metaphorical absence, a warning against forgetting, or simply the only appropriate response. But powerful though these meanings are, they often underplay the ambiguity of silence’s signifying power. This article addresses the liminality of silence through an analysis of its richly textured role in the memorial soundscapes of Berlin. Beyond an aural version of erasure, unspeakability, or the space for reflection upon it, I argue that these silent spaces must always be heard as part of their surrounding urban environment, refracting wider spatial practices and dis/order. When conventions are reversed – when the present is silent – the past can resound in surprising and provocative ways, collapsing spatial and temporal borders and escaping the ritualized boundaries of formal commemoration. This is explored through four different memorial situations: the disturbing resonances within the Holocaust Memorial; the transgressive processes of a collective silent walk; Gleis 17 railway memorial’s opening up of heterotopic ‘gaps’ in time; and sounded/silent history in the work of singer Tania Alon. Each of these examples, in different ways, frames a slippage between urban sound and memorial silence, creating a parallel symbolic space that the past and the present can inhabit simultaneously. In its unpredictable fluidity, silence becomes a mobile and subversive force, producing an imaginative space that is ambiguous, affective and deeply meaningful. A closer attention to these different practices of listening disrupts a top-down, strategic discourse of silence as conventionally emblematic of reflection and distance. The contemporary urban soundscape that slips through the silent cracks problematizes the narrative hegemony of memorial itself.
Abstract: Que font les petits-enfants de l’histoire et des valeurs de leurs grands-parents quand ceux-ci ont connu l’immigration et traversé des épreuves majeures ? Comment tracent-ils leur propre chemin entre la fidélité au passé de leur famille, les tâches du présent, la préoccupation de transmettre à leurs enfants leurs références identitaires ? Comment se passent d’une génération à l’autre les traumatismes et les valeurs ? Quel regard les descendants des immigrés portent-ils sur leur histoire familiale ? Comment assument-ils la difficile responsabilité d’en témoigner ? Comment construisent-ils leur identité et leur place dans la société ? Les auteurs présentent et analysent vingt-cinq entretiens qu'ils ont menés avec des petits-enfants de Juifs venus de Pologne, qui ont connu l'exil, la difficile intégration en France, la guerre et la Shoah, les bouleversements historiques du XXe siècle. Deux entretiens réalisés en Pologne les complètent. A travers des récits de vie intense, les auteurs proposent une réflexion originale sur ces questions dont l'actualité récente en Europe a montré l'importance des enjeux individuels, sociaux, politiques. Ils éclairent aussi des aspects méconnus du judaïsme. A une époque où les migrations tendent à devenir un phénomène généralisé, où les guerres et les génocides se multiplient, les auteurs souhaitent contribuer à une réflexion sur le devenir des immigrés et de ceux qui ont été confrontés à un traumatisme historique majeur, et sur l'aide qu'ils pourraient recevoir.
Abstract: La disparition de la quasi-totalité des Juifs de Pologne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale est due à leur assassinat systématique par les Allemands. Mais que sait-on des comportements de la population polonaise ? La paix revenue, que sont devenus les derniers survivants ? Que nous dit aujourd’hui l’irruption de ce passé dans la société polonaise ? Comment vivre avec la mémoire d’Auschwitz, de Treblinka, de Belzec, autant de mémoriaux situés en Pologne ?
Depuis une quinzaine d’années, des historiens de ce pays ont montré combien il était difficile aux Juifs qui tentaient d’échapper aux tueurs de trouver appui auprès des populations locales, surtout en milieu rural, tant en raison de la politique de terreur menée par l’occupant que de l’hostilité de la société polonaise à l’égard des Juifs. Leurs travaux font désormais autorité dans le monde entier. Pourtant, depuis quelques années, les autorités de Varsovie mettent en œuvre une « politique historique » qui vise à minorer, voire à nier, la participation de franges importantes de la population polonaise à la traque des Juifs.
Sur place, malgré les embûches et les intimidations, les historiens travaillent, publient, organisent des colloques, forment des étudiants. Les auteurs réunis dans cet ouvrage témoignent de la vitalité de cette historiographie. Faire connaître aujourd’hui la fécondité scientifique et la portée critique de la nouvelle école historique polonaise est une exigence intellectuelle, morale et politique.
Abstract: The paper argues that the recent history of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania is characterized by major provision (for research, teaching and publishing) coming from state-sponsored agencies, particularly a state commission on both Nazi and Soviet crimes. Problematically, the commission is itself simultaneously active in revising the narrative per se of the Holocaust, principally according to the ‘Double Genocide’ theories of the 2008 Prague Declaration that insists on ‘equalization’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Lithuanian agencies have played a disproportionate role in that declaration, in attempts at legislating some of its components in the European Parliament and other EU bodies, and ‘export’ of the revisionist model to the West. Much international support for solid independent Lithuanian Holocaust researchers and NGOs was cut off as the state commission set out determinedly to dominate the field, which is perceived to have increasing political implications in East-West politics. But this history must not obscure an
impressive list of local accomplishments. A tenaciously devoted group of Holocaust survivors themselves, trained as academics or professionals in other fields, educated themselves to publish books, build a mini-museum (that has defied the revisionists) within the larger state-sponsored Jewish museum, and worked to educate both pupils and the wider public. Second, a continuing stream of non-Jewish Lithuanian scholars, educators, documentary
film makers and others have at various points valiantly defied state pressures and contributed significantly and selflessly. The wider picture is that Holocaust Studies has been built most successfully by older Holocaust survivors and younger non-Jews, in both groups often by those coming to work in it from other specialties out of a passion for justice and truth in history, while lavishly financed state initiatives have been anchored in the inertia of nationalist regional politics.
Abstract: The successful incorporation of Eastern European states into the European Union, NATO and the Western pro-democratic family of nations usually focuses on the import of ideas, governmental and societal structures, and products, from West to East, and of large movements of East European populations westward. Often overlooked in the export of ideas has been the intensive, expensive and industrial-scale effort to rewrite the history of the Holocaust and World War II in the direction of Double Genocide and Holocaust Obfuscation, a trend spurred on dramatically by the decline in East-West relations and the increasingly frightening movement of Russia toward revanchist authoritarianism that threatens its neighbors. The paper argues that no good can or will come from the adaptation of models of bogus nationalist history rooted in far-right, ultranationalist thought in the liberated states of Eastern Europe. Double Genocide and its corollaries as currently practiced and underwritten by state budgets, represent a threat to history, freedom of thought and speech, equal rights and ultimately, a ruse to insert far-right academic revisionism disguised as anti-Russian activity into Western discourse.
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Muslim, Antisemitism: Far right, Anti-Zionism, Holocaust Denial, Holocaust Memorials, Holocaust Education, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Jewish - Muslim Relations
