INITIAL PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT

---

This trip to Auschwitz could be the culmination of an educational project conceived 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 resentful of them"), I realized that many students did not really understand the extent of what the Shoah was. So I made the decision this year with the class of 1^era The one for which I am responsible, to work on memory by having them meet a friend of mine, Benjamin Rapoport, deported "racial" and interned from 1940 to 1944, notably at Auschwitz. Being able to bring the students on site is an unprecedented opportunity: this is what motivates this application from the Maine de Biran high school.

I. THE AUSCHWITZ MEMORY (PRELIMINARY WORK)

- The aim is to encourage students to question what Auschwitz represents for 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 summary: "what memory of Auschwitz today".

II. THE DIRECT EXPLOITATION OF TRAVEL, AUSCHWITZ

- If Maine de Biran’s application is selected for this study tour, the students will leave with a camera. They will be absolutely free to film what they want about the camp (within the limits of the site’s regulations). They will edit the film themselves. 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 10th to 12th 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 will have to be compared with the one collected earlier on the memory of Auschwitz). This (or these) screening(s) will also be an opportunity to organize a debate, so that the 1^era He conveys to the other high school students their own impressions, the feelings they may have had about Auschwitz and what such a place now means to them.

In addition to this, the students who participated in the project (at least some of them) will work on the use of images at Auschwitz as part of the VSE (Supervised Personal Works). 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 visitors (thus reminding him that the suffering and death of the deportees were those of human beings and not dehumanized and registered livestock), it is a question of leading the students to reflect on the use of the image as 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 pictures taken in the camps, those taken by the Nazis and those taken by the inmates themselves (the latter having been the subject of an exhibition at the Hôtel Sully in 2001).

III. OTHER ONGOING WORK ON THE SHOAH MEMORY

Other students will work precisely 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, published by L'Harmattan). Now 97 years old, he never stops meeting the younger generations to "tell them"., did you confide in me one day for him who has been with me for so long? In addition to the transcription of B. Rapoport’s account (based on the interview they will carry out), students will examine the role of the witness and the place he holds in the memory of the Holocaust for both historians and civil society. They will also have to reflect on what they must now transmit as those who survived gradually disappear.

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

Some, since this is a class where students take a "music" option, will wonder about the role of music at Auschwitz, but also in other places, between "official" orchestras set up by the Nazis and clandestine ones, camp songs, those that the deportees were forced to sing and songs of resistance. In addition to an analysis of this "musical presence", the aim is to collect these songs on audio tape and present them in their context.

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

A number of meetings may be envisaged:

- With Jean-Marie Matisson, civil party in the Papon trial, to discuss what it means for the memory of the Shoah and the families of the victims to have a republican justice system convicting an official who was particularly zealous in collaboration and deportation.

- 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 Les 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 on debates and summaries of exchanges with other high school students, transcription of survivors' testimonies accompanied by comments and reflections from the 1^era participating in the project, various works carried out on memory...) could be collected on a website and, why not, depending on the available resources, be published.

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

---

Summary