Our Dialogues in Holocaust Education online seminar series has given us the privilege of talking to leading Holocaust scholars about their recent research. How, though, can this be of use to our teaching about the Holocaust in the classroom? Here we suggest five ways that the series, accessible via recordings, may be valuable in dispelling misconceptions or adding crucial nuance to our students’ understanding of the Holocaust.
‘Bystander Society ‘with Professor Mary Fulbrook and Ben Green
Using personal stories to reassess reactions of bystanders
At beginning of our session with Professor Mary Fulbrook and Ben Green we studied a photograph of Dr Michael Siegel, a German Jewish lawyer, being led, bloodied and bruised through the streets of Munich by his SA assailants. Ben, Dr Siegel’s great-grandson, related the narrative of what happened on that day in March 1933. Professor Fulbrook then went further in telling us about the agency that ordinary ‘Aryans’ had and the part they played in the process by which Jews began to be seen as the ‘other’. Not only do these personal stories of both victims and bystanders help to illuminate the human impact of Nazi persecution but also dispel the misconception that persecution was a slowly evolving process – it had real consequences just weeks after Hitler came to power.
‘Rescuers’ with Professor Ari Cohen and Dr Mark Gudgel
Rescuers were diverse, complicated, often flawed people
It is, perhaps, easy for students with some knowledge of the Holocaust to stereotype ‘rescuers’ in an Oskar Schindler shaped perception. The session with Professor Ari Cohen and Dr Mark Gudgel helped to shake that misconception in two main ways: 1) There were a huge diversity of rescuers who acted for a multitude of reasons and in a variety of ways and 2) Oskar Schindler was a deeply flawed individual who’s hagiography obscures the heroic actions of Emilie Schindler. Nevertheless, these revelations might actually help our students in coming closer to understanding who ‘rescuers’ are – very ordinary people who choose to act in extraordinary ways in certain circumstances.
‘The Holocaust – An unfinished history’ with Professor Dan Stone
The Holocaust is about more than just Auschwitz-Birkenau
Many students, certainly in my classroom, come to their study of the Holocaust with some knowledge that tells that the Shoah was simply the destruction of German Jews by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. For an hour Professor Dan Stone took us through his book (which comes highly recommended as a one volume history accessible for time starved teachers) and dispelled this misconception. Highlighting the fact that German Jews make up no more than 5% of total victims of the Holocaust and that the Nazis were abetted in their genocidal design by the actions of others such as Romanians under Ion Antonescu, Professor Stone also urged us to understand the importance of camps other than Auschwitz-Birkenau and phenomena such as the Death Marches which are often neglected in our teaching.
‘The Ravine’ with Professor Wendy Lower
How just one photograph can help build a multi-layered understanding
In a fantastic session Professor Lower took us through her decade long narrative and disciplinary journey to uncover the history behind a photograph that was taken in Ukraine on October 13th, 1941. The opening of archives in Eastern Europe has allowed scholars to start to understand the nature of the Holocaust in territory occupied by the Nazis after their invasion of the Soviet Union. The photograph that Professor Lower expertly showed us how to analyse allows students to grasp more fully the reality of the Holocaust in Ukraine: the role of local collaborators in the killing of their neighbours, the actions of ‘ordinary’ Germans who weren’t necessarily ideologically committed Nazis, the response of the Slovakian photographer to the scene and, perhaps most importantly, the identity and humanity of the victims of the shooting.
‘The Holocaust in Belarus’ with Professor Anika Walke
The experience of Soviet Jews was very different
There is a danger that students see the ‘Jews of Europe’, both in their pre-war lives and experience of the Holocaust as one distinct group. Similarly, there is the possibility that necessary and meaningful historical encounters with assimilated western European Jews leave students with the impression that all Jewish lives were like those of Anne Frank, for instance. The Dialogue with Professor Anika Walke helps to dispel these misconceptions with a fascinating examination of those Jews who lived in Soviet territories, with a particular focus on those who resided in Belorussia. Professor Walke expertly took us through the particular dynamics of pre-war Jewish life in the Soviet Union – and, indeed, the differences that existed between Jews in these territories as well. Similarly, we learned from Professor Walke about the ways in which Jews in Belorussia responded to a Nazi genocide that was different in important aspects from that faced by German or French Jews, for instance.
