Beyond ‘moral lessons’: what does it mean to learn about the Holocaust?
‘The Holocaust’.
Like ‘the Reformation‘ or ‘the Industrial Revolution’, ‘the Holocaust’ as a historical term bookends a period of the past, in this case 1933-45. Neat and discrete, it is parcelled up and secured with the warning we wish to tell ourselves – this is where hate can lead.
Packaged in this way, The Holocaust becomes a traumatic past rendered as consoling narrative, which finds redemption in the moral lessons we wish to convey. Tidy and uncomplicated, yes, but perhaps covering up a more difficult history, a more destabilising and unsettling narrative.
We know the past is messy, like our messy present. What happens, then, when we restore complexity to the past? What hidden issues does it reveal, in its untidiness and complexity?
Much ‘Holocaust education’ (and, indeed, much history teaching in general) is designed to socialise young people into certain cultural norms, and to teach pre-determined ‘lessons’ that, it is claimed, are inherent in the past. But this quest to serve particular moral lessons, or ways of thinking, creates a real danger: that those aspects of the past that do not ‘fit’ become omitted from the narrative. This process of oversimplification allows us to ‘domesticate’ the Holocaust, to allow it to settle comfortably into our pre-existing paradigms without overly disturbing our world view.
Interrogating preconceptions
As a way in to exploring the complexity of the past, it can be useful to take students’ pre-existing ideas as a starting point. Following this route, the learning goal is not simply to add more to the sum total of the students’ knowledge – it isn’t simply about knowing ‘more stuff’. Instead, a deeper learning can arise from exposing the commonly held myths and misconceptions prevalent in popular thinking about human behaviour in the Holocaust. The educator needs to surface these pre-existing ideas, providing an opportunity for students to test them against the historical evidence, to create a space for reflection and discussion as a more complex picture emerges.
While Programme Director at UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, I developed the activity ‘Being Human?’ along exactly these lines. The activity begins by exploring students’ presuppositional knowledge of the past. It asks how they account for the actions of those who took part or collaborated in the killing; those who tried to prevent the genocide or rescued people; and those who did not take any active role.
Typically, a view emerges of killers as evil, psychopathic Nazis, or else people who had no choice – if these people did not kill – students’ believe – then they would be killed themselves; of rescuers as heroic, good and noble; and of the rest as ordinary people who did not know what was happening, didn’t care or were too powerless or frightened to do anything about it. Having surfaced this common knowledge, these preconceived ideas, students are then asked to test their beliefs against a wide range of historical case studies, placing the individuals that they investigate along a continuum on the classroom wall that displays the categories of ‘Perpetrators’ through ‘Collaborators’ and ‘Bystanders’ to ‘Rescuers and Resisters’.
Through the examination of these detailed accounts, photographs and associated documents, they also search for motivation and intent, writing on Post-It notes their researched explanations of the decisions and choices made by real people, and then sticking these interpretations on to the case studies which are now displayed across the classroom wall.
A more complex – and unsettling – picture of the past
The picture of the past that is revealed is far more complex – and far more unsettling – than anticipated. Students discover that there is no record of anyone being killed or sent to a concentration camp for refusing to murder Jewish people, while there are records of people refusing to murder who were simply given other duties or even sent back home. They learn that, while Nazi antisemitic ideology was the driving motivation of many decision-makers and killers, others participated in mass shootings because of peer pressure, ambition, or a warped sense of duty. They find examples of rescuers who were antisemitic but who still risked their lives to save Jewish people, while others with more enlightened views did nothing. In the picturesque Austrian town of Mauthausen, students discover local women, elderly men and teenage boys joining in the hunt for escaped Soviet prisoners of war and murdering them; in a village in Burgenland they find people deporting the extended family of their Roma blacksmith but keeping the blacksmith himself rather than losing his skills. And students uncover the widespread acquiescence of people who enriched themselves through the despoliation of the Jewish people, affirming their support for the regime’s persecutory policies by flocking to public auctions where they bought the possessions of their deported neighbours.
A more complex view of the past reveals a shocking truth: you do not need to hate anyone to be complicit in genocide.
“It is in the cognitive dissonance between how we perceive the world to be and how it is revealed to us when we explore the complexity of the past that we open a space for real learning: not simply taking in new information but having to reorder our categories and our understandings. ”
It is in the cognitive dissonance between how we perceive the world to be and how it is revealed to us when we explore the complexity of the past that we open a space for real learning: not simply taking in new information but having to reorder our categories and our understandings. Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust, and yet – in themselves – were evidently insufficient to prevent the genocide.
Enlightenment values offer way out
Notions of tolerance and of human rights have been advocated since the Enlightenment; belief in the intrinsic value of human life, the ‘golden rule’ of treating others as you would have them treat you, ideas of kindness, courage, charity and goodwill to those in need are all part of the ethical and moral teaching that have underpinned the values of Western society for centuries.
And yet it was from that same society that the Holocaust sprang. The implications are deeply unsettling:
“ [As] educators we must acknowledge that to educate after, in spite of, and because of Auschwitz, we also have to face the very worst dilemmas. There is no way out... Auschwitz meant the collapse of all faith in the capacity of civilized society to instil humane values. Educators must come to terms with the enormous significance of Auschwitz for our ideals of education. ”
If we do not face Auschwitz, if we simply turn it into a metaphor for the ‘lessons’ we wish young people to learn, then we deprive them of the opportunity to ask the challenging and difficult questions that come from the specificity of the event itself.
How was it possible that not long ago, and not far from where we live, people collaborated in the murder of their Jewish neighbours? Why didn’t people do more to save them? How does the genocide of European Jewry relate to the other atrocities committed by the Nazis: the genocide of the Roma and Sinti (or Gypsies); the mass murder of disabled people; the genocide of the Poles and Slavs; the persecution and murder of political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and others? How did the victims respond to, and how far did they resist, the unfolding genocide?
There are no simple answers, and the process of enquiry will be challenging and unsettling, but as Paddy Walsh has argued: ‘history is made easier at the price of making it less significant.’
Note
This blog is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in The Challenges of Interaction: Developing Education at Memorial Sites, Ines Brachmann, Yariv Lapid, Wolfgang Schmutz (Eds.) Europe for Citizens: 2015
Image by Olivia Hemingway.