Teaching the Holocaust: Lessons from Yad Vashem

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.
(Benjamin Disraeli)

As a history teacher I have always strongly believed that Holocaust education is a pivotal part of the curriculum and a chance to challenge both religious and political extremism. For some time, however, much of my teaching was very linear and focused mostly on teaching the mechanics of the Holocaust. Whilst pupils would learn about the history of antisemitism, our lessons covered, above all, the atrocities and death camps, with the story of Oskar Schindler (and Schindler’s List) a key component of Holocaust education – a very two dimensional way of conveying history! My move away from this linear model of teaching began following my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau with the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) Lessons from Auschwitz Project in 2010. Seeing the scale and systematic nature of the Holocaust first hand, made me appreciate the need to give a face and identity to the victims, perpetrators and bystanders of the Holocaust.

HET also organise teacher training courses in Jerusalem during the summer in partnership with Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel. This year, 22 teachers from the UK participated in the ten-day course which consists of a series of lectures and workshops. The lectures covered a breadth of topics relating to the Holocaust, including the educational philosophy and rationale for teaching the subject, nineteenth-century antisemitism, Jewish life between the wars in Poland, the establishment of the ghettos, and Jewish resistance. Two Holocaust survivors, Dr Ehud Loeb and Ms Channa Meiri, were also invited to speak and share their testimonies.

The course highlighted the complexity and multiple layers of the Holocaust, the importance of telling the human stories rather than just the structure of destruction, and how important the use of vocabulary is when teaching this subject. Talking to other history teachers, I discovered that we prepared similar content for our lessons. Whilst I do look at whether the Holocaust could happen again, I realised that I have always implied that liberation bought with it an end to the Holocaust. However, the testimonies of Dr Ehud Loeb and Ms Channa Meiri showed that the impact of the Holocaust continued after liberation: it is part of the fabric of Israeli society and the survivors (and their families) still live with their experiences.

There is a danger of over simplifying the Holocaust: the Jews were victims and the Nazis were all evil perpetrators. Telling the story of individuals allows us to see the three dimensional history of the Holocaust. We must teach the story of the Holocaust as a human story (of both victims and perpetrators). As Shulamit Imber, the Pedagogical Director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, highlighted in one of the lectures: ‘We need to ask how people lived and not just how they died.’

I have always used the term ‘Holocaust’ to teach this topi. Questioning whether or not to use this term in our teaching may seem pedantic and little more than an issue of semantics; however, many survivors prefer to use the term Shoah. I now appreciate that it is also important to recognise other groups who were persecuted by the Nazis and the use of specific vocabulary - Porajomos (the Great Devouring) to refer to the genocide of the Roma Gypsies, for example.

I will henceforth seek to incorporate three key elements into my lessons. First, sharing the philosophy and resources of teaching the Holocaust with my department; second, taking a thematic rather than a linear approach to teaching the Holocaust (‘Life before the War’, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Liberation’); and third, looking to develop a holistic, cross curricular approach, including inviting a Holocaust survivor to share their testimony with pupils.

I would advise any history teacher to go on the course. I have, however, returned from Yad Vashem with far more questions than I went with and the temptation to rip up current schemes of work is very real (a view shared by most participants on this course). To quote Imber, once again, the impact and legacy of this education programme is, above all, the realisation that 'the Holocaust needs to become part of the narrative of civilisation'.