Learning from eyewitnesses: Examining the history and future of personal encounters with holocaust survivors and resistance fighters

Abstract

This chapter summarises the main findings of a study on the educational culture of memory. It analyses the role and the potential of eyewitnesses as teachers. As the first generation of Holocaust survivors slowly disappears, it is important to reconstruct what they have tried to convey to youth, and to what effect. The study of educational memorial cultures is a new interdisciplinary field of research, linking historical, educational, pedagogical, social science, and memory studies. Every nation has its own history of education, and in every nation two elements exist in the politics of memory: Pride and shame. These opposites create a continuous tension. The chapter reports on three significant developments: (a) the change from silencing the memories and experiences of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to addressing them, with a turning point in the early 1980s; (b) the change in managing and accepting emotions in education and teaching, from a refusal and rejection of emotion to embracing emotion; and (c) unexpected consequences of the growing attention for individual eyewitness testimony, including a diminishing of education about World War II as an international history involving multiple continents. The chapter addresses the dilemmas involved in taking multiple perspectives in education about World War II, and it provides practical suggestions for effective teaching with testimonies and with eyewitnesses as teachers.