So I will take a sunny day on the train in France.
Leaving Paris was a strange experience. My time there was certainly the most rewarding yet. In numerous places I have seen the Hebrew supplication Zachor, "remember." This concept, as I have immersed myself in my research, has taken on a new and personal meaning.
I think that one of the most intriguing and worrisome truths regarding Holocaust studies is that while the Holocaust as an event is one of the most researched topics in human history it seems that remembrance, true zachor, is more and more difficult to ensure. This is a nascent idea for me and I welcome comment and apologize in advance if it is controversial.
In my own American education I was taught a good but overwhelmingly broad history of the Holocaust. I worry that this teaching style might be damaging. "Six million Jews were killed," we are told, "simply because they were Jewish." But when we view the issue through such a wide lens we lose sight of the fact that each of those six million was a person, a human being with a life story. Perhaps they were Heinz Najman, a 13 year old boy, never devoutly Jewish but hunted for it anyway. Perhaps they were Bernard Najman, only 2 years old, never given the chance to decide what Judaism meant to him before he was sentenced to the gas chamber for it. I am reluctant to view the Holocaust as anything that happened "simply because," because that logic seems almost to lend itself to the logic of Nazism itself.
I rather think that the Holocaust should be told personally. This is what I will try to do with Heinz. Opa and his family were far more than simple Jewish victims of Nazi hatred; they were human beings with wants and needs and they ought to be treated as such in any telling of their tale. To reduce them to the identity Hitler sought to impose on them would be a dramatic and hurtful disservice.
I think that an education in this vein can also stir interest that other pedagogic styles cannot. Anne Frank's story was remarkably touching and relatable because of its intimately personal nature. Anne was a living person with emotion and depth, no matter how adamantly Nazi propaganda claimed otherwise. Heinz Najman, too, was a human being, resisting his oppressors from the first day that they threatened him and his family, never passive as the word "victim" implies. And I am remarkably and unstatably proud to descend from such a person.
This is not to say that such personal narratives do not exist. Indeed great work has been done and continues to be undertaken to document and share the lives of those people killed during the Shoah. But I worry that many general Holocaust education methods gloss over the humanity of those killed by lumping them together in the decidedly inhuman abstraction "Jewish victims."
What does this mean? I think that educators should take caution in all cases of genocide because it is incredibly easy in teaching such subjects to slip into faceless and yeastless statistics and generalities. I ask that, instead, educators should highlight the humanity of those killed, as this humanity is the very thing those perpetrating genocide try to deny. We have not yet learned, despite all the time and money dedicated to studying the Holocaust, how to prevent genocide. Several are ongoing today.
Perhaps it is time for a new way to teach this subject.
