INITIAL PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT

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This trip to Auschwitz could be the culmination of an educational project designed even before I knew that the Shoah Memorial and the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah were organizing this study tour. Confronted more and more frequently with disarming questions ("But why the Jews? They had to do something to get so angry at them"), I realized that many students do not really understand the magnitude of what the Holocaust was. So I made the decision, this year with the class of 1^era L in charge of which, to work on the Memory by making them meet one of my friends, Benjamin Rapoport, deported 'racial' and interned from 1940 to 1944, notably at Auschwitz. Being able to bring the students on site constitutes an unprecedented opportunity: this is what motivates this application from the Maine de Biran high school.

I. The memory of Auschwitz (preliminary work)

- It is a matter of getting the students to question what Auschwitz represents for the younger generations, by bringing out their own representations, but also those of their high school classmates. The students will develop an anonymous questionnaire that will be submitted to the other classes. The analysis of the answers will lead to the writing of a synthesis: "what memory of Auschwitz today".

II. THE DIRECT EXPLOITATION OF THE AUSCHWITZ JOURNEY

- If the application of Maine de Biran is selected for this study trip, the students will leave with a camera. They will be absolutely free to film what they want from the camp (within the limits of the site’s regulations). They will edit the film themselves[1]. It’s about getting them to justify their editing choices: why choose this shot or this sequence? What do they want to show? What do they want to share?

Back in Bergerac, the film can be shown to all classes, from tenth to twelfth grade. At the end of the screening, the students who participated in the trip will collect their classmates' impressions by questioning them through another questionnaire (which must be compared with the one previously collected on the memory of Auschwitz). This (or these) projection(s) will also be an opportunity to organize a debate, so that the 1^era L transmit to the other students of the high school their own impressions, the feelings they may have been confronted with at Auschwitz and what such a place now represents for them.

In conjunction with this, the students who participated in the project (at least some of them) will work, as part of the TPE (Supervised Personal Works), on the use of the image at Auschwitz. From the anthropometric photographs of the deportees taken upon their arrival at the Lager which, diverted from their primary function, have become part of the memory of Auschwitz by now offering themselves to the gaze of the visitor (reminding him that the suffering and death of the deportees were those of human beings and not dehumanized and registered livestock), it is about getting the students to reflect on the use of the image as a part of the memory of the Shoah. Memory that they will confront with that of the testimony of the survivors. They will also be able to work on the photographs taken in the camps, those taken by the Nazis and those taken by the detainees themselves (the latter having been the subject of an exhibition at the Hôtel Sully in 2001).

III. OTHER WORK CARRIED OUT ON THE MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST

Other students will precisely work on the testimonies of the survivors:

- That of Benjamin Rapoport who recounted his painful experience of deportation in a book published in 2002 (Ma vie, mes camps, aux éditions L'Harmattan) and who, now 97 years old, continues to meet the younger generations to "tell them, him who has been so long did you confide in me one day. In addition to the transcription of B. Rapoport’s account (based on the interview they will carry out), the students will question the role of the witness and the place he holds in the memory of the Shoah for both historians and civil society. They will also have to reflect on what they will now have to transmit as those who survived gradually disappear.

- A similar work could be conducted with the stories of deportees who accompany the students on this study trip, if they agree to do so.

Some, since it is a class where students follow a "music" option, will question the role of music at Auschwitz, but also in other Lägers, between "official" orchestras assembled by the Nazis and clandestine ones, camp songs, those that the deportees were forced to sing and the songs of resistance. It is, besides an analysis of this "musical presence", to collect on audio tape these songs and present them in their context.

Others, finally, will work on negationism and revisionism: their foundations, their origins, their audience, in the past and currently.

A number of meetings may be considered:

- With Jean-Marie Matisson, civil party in the Papon trial, to discuss what the conviction by the republican justice of a particularly zealous official in collaboration and deportation represents for the memory of the Holocaust and the families of the victims.

- I am also studying the possibility of organizing a meeting between the students and Bernard Reviriego, director of the Departmental Archives of the Dordogne and author of Juifs en Dordogne, 1939-1944, published in 2003 by the Archives and Fanlac editions.

All the work carried out by the students (impressions of trips, reports of debates and synthesis of exchanges with other high school students, transcription of survivors' testimonies accompanied by comments and reflections from the 1^era participating in the project, different works carried out on memory...) could be gathered on a website and, why not, depending on the available means, be the subject of a publication.

The implementation of this project will be carried out, for the most part, within the framework of very small enterprises.

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Summary