The Shoah Memorial has no blueprint for teaching the history of the Holocaust and in no way seeks to dictate any arbitrary method of teaching. Based on our own experience, which we would like to share, we are simply offering some guidance on how the subject can be taught.
Talking about the Holocaust in a secondary school class has consequences. Many teachers—and we entirely agree—consider this episode of the Second World War a singular event in the history of our times. The number of victims, who they were—men, women, children, the very old and the very young, the sick and the healthy, etc. — how they were killed and the administrative and industrial machine that was set in motion to accomplish what seems to be beyond human understanding give the Holocaust an emotional dimension, exceeding anything students would have experienced until then and everything teachers have taught them during the school year.
Between 1970 and 1980, the topic of the Holocaust was broached very superficially, if at all. Today it cannot be ignored. This class is often one of the most emotionally charged in any school year. That is actually the problem. Should the Holocaust be taught as a subject that must be given particular emphasis, charged with exceptional emotional content compared to other chapters taught during the year, or should it simply be integrated into a logical, chronological continuity without singling it out from the rest of the course? We believe that the tragic dimensions of Holocartier and the questions it cannot fail to raise mean that the subject cannot be just one among others. However, some precautions must be taken to avoid possible pitfalls.
Clearly, teaching about the Holocaust can and should call on emotion and play on feelings, but these are not in themselves the subjects of a history class. To stop at emotions is not teaching history. Par exemple, écouter l’histoire racontée par un survivant du camp de la mort ne peut pas être en soi le seul enseignement de l'Holocauste pour les élèves du secondaire, mais c’est un supplément éducatif très utile. Reading poignant accounts of what happened to children hidden from their persecutors, tragic tales of Polish ghettos or of survivors whose entire families were annihilated are all useful. Nous ne sentons pas, cependant, qu'ils devraient être le principal centre d'intérêt d’une classe sur l'extermination des juifs. Teachers can use such writings as supporting documents that help to put into perspective the overall goals pursued by the Holocaust’s perpetrators.
We feel that teaching the Holocaust should not simply become a race on ethics, a lesson on moral principles, which could be summed up as a guilt-inducing injunction to “never again” embark on this course. The Holocaust is a historical event and must be seen as such. The lesson to be passed on to young people is that extermination is the ultimate phase in a process which the American historian Raul Hilberg outlined very clearly: definition, exclusion, spoliation, concentration and liquidation.
Precision is important. The words used must be exactly right and clearly understood. For example, teachers must be careful when using words adopted by the executioners themselves and systematically put them between quotations; expressions describing the various types of camps (internment, concentration, death or extermination camps) must help to highlight the different treatments given to detainees. Teachers should also emphasize the vocabulary the Nazis used to describe the Jews to dehumanize them, its consequences and their attempt to cloak the horror and scale of a plan to murder millions of people in mundane euphemisms.
In our opinion, teachers should emphasize that the decision to go through with the "Final Solution" came relatively late (late summer-early fall 1941) and connected it not only to the creeping nature of violence and anti-Semitic speeches, but also to the war in the East against "Judeo-Bolshevism". The connection with the massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern front is worth recalling (1.5 million shot dead).
The swiftness of execution should also be highlighted. Using the French example, teachers can explain that half the Jewish victims leaving France were deported between March 27 (when the first transport left France for Auschwitz) and September 30, 1942 (transport 39) and three-fourths by December 7, 1943 (transport 64). Three-fourths of Holocaust victims were killed between March 1942 (the start of the Reinhardt operation) and November 1943. In 1944, 434,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the space of seven weeks (16 May to 9 July 1944).
Teachers can also emphasize the concomitance of Nazi actions: on July 16-17, 1942, the Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup took place. On July 22, the massive deportations from Warsaw began, continuing until September (300,000 people were transported to Treblinka and murdered there). Between these two dates, Himmler decided to build four huge crematoria in Birkenau.
Based on the work of the historian Christopher Browning, by example, teachers may also wish to discuss the human ability to behave with an extraordinary lack of humanity, the “banality” of murder and evil, blind submission to the law, obedience to authority legitimized by ideology and indoctrination and the strong inclination to conform to a pack mentality. All of these factors can turn ordinary men into killers if circumstances lead them along that path.
To put the Holocaust in its proper historical perspective, and if students seem to need further clarification either directly or indirectly, teachers could briefly refer to some relevant comparisons. This would help to define the Shoah more precisely, highlight its specificity, emphasize its singularity, accentuate its impact and put it into perspective. For example, a brief reminder of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda can show some of the points in common between the claims of Nazi and Hutu leaders and their stated goal in both cases: to exterminate an entire population, starting with the children. The Rwandan genocide’s rustic crudeness can be contrasted with the industrial professionalism of the European Jewish extermination.
In any event, and from any angle, a lesson on the Holocaust requires a degree of expertise both on the subject and the issues it raises.
