Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust - it's a huge number, you can't grasp it.
Therefore we focus on individuals, families, and communities that were lost in the Holocaust.
Our approach to teaching the Holocaust is to start with the Jewish victim, because that's
the essence of the Holocaust story. In order to do that we start with life before the war.
We're trying to understand their life before, the rich life they had, the culture. They
had different political movements, youth movements, and sports clubs, and together with that we
can give back the faces and names to the victims.
We can also deal with topics that the students can relate to themselves, for example: tradition
versus modernity, children rebelling against the parents, and in that way, we want to present
the Jews as living people.
Focusing on everyday life during the Holocaust does not mean we avoid the topic of death.
People who lived through the Holocaust were in constant contact with death. People were
constantly confronted with the need and necessity to make very crucial decisions and every choice
they made essentially, was a bad choice. As the scholar Lawrence Langer said, they were
living in a world of "choiceless choices".
When teaching about daily life in the Holocaust, We present different dilemmas. For example:
Is it justifiable to send a young child outside of the ghetto to bring food for his family,
when he's risking his life? The child is risking his life, not the adult.
Is it right to give up your portion, your food ration, which is very, very small, to purchase a prayer book?
What is more important? A lot of parents were confronted with the
question of should I send my child into hiding? Not knowing what's happening to him, not knowing
what care he's going to get, not even knowing if it was going to lead to saving his life.
We teach dilemmas for empathy, not for judgment. Teachers shouldn't role-play with Holocaust
education. Students can't put themselves in the extreme situations these people were in the Holocaust.
It isn't obvious that after the Holocaust the survivors would return to life. We would
have expected that maybe they would be obsessed with revenge, but instead they found the strength
and chose to rebuild their lives and get an education, to contribute to society - and
in that way to rebuild what the Nazis tried to destroy.
One of our ways to deal with this topic in class with our students is bringing a survivor
and listening to his story in person. And alternative that I use is a documentary, part
of the documentary series, called "Witnesses and Education", where we have stories of individual
survivors, and through that we learn about their life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
To summarize. the Jewish victim is the center of our educational approach. We start with
life before the Holocaust, showing the Jew as a living person in society.
We continue with the question how did they survive and live in a world of chaos, and we end with
the survivors returning to life with strength and energy.