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Teaching the Shoah:
Four Approaches That Draw Students In
Kathleen C. Martin
Boston University
| MANY STUDENTS ASSUME that history has nothing to do with them and therefore is a waste of their time, so finding a way to get involuntary history students truly involved in a topic is always the most challenging aspect of teaching it. As passive listeners they will remember little; as active participants they will remember more and – in at least a few cases – decide that they would like to pursue the topic further. Because we are historians, we know that what happened in the past is the key to understanding what is happening now and even a potential indicator of what might happen in the future, if we analyze historical events with care. To our students this is far less obvious. However, they live in a world to which the events of the Shoah are horrifyingly relevant. During their brief lives, the world has experienced "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Rwanda, the ongoing atrocities in Darfur, escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and suicide bombings in Madrid and London. The news story that all of them, well-informed or not, remember most vividly from their youth is the events of September 11, 2001 in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Like the Shoah, these are illustrations of what can happen when religious or political ideology trumps moral values and human decency, validating remorseless violence against an alien, demonized "other." That is why coming to grips with the Shoah can help students reach a deeper understanding, not just of the twentieth century, but also of the world in which they live today. |
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Taking on complex topics like the Shoah in a freshman survey course presents particular difficulties. There is a great deal of material to cover within a very limited time. In some ways, we can only scratch the surface, mentioning key events and contending interpretations, then moving on. (In my course, for example, I have only three class meetings available to address the Shoah.) Another challenge lies in the involuntary nature of many students' participation in the course. In my experience, students who are merely fulfilling a distribution requirement are particularly resistant to examining contending arguments and evaluating evidence. They want to be told "what happened" so they can write it down and memorize it for the exam. Understanding historical complexity is the last thing on their minds. |
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Many of the theoretical approaches to explaining Hitler's war on the Jews strike the average survey student as dry and uninteresting. What role did the long history of German anti-Semitism play? Was there something about Germans that made them likelier to "follow orders" from authority figures? How much did the specific personality of Hitler matter? To what extent were the Poles accomplices, or are they more properly seen as victims? Perhaps most important of all, why did so many "ordinary men" commit atrocities in carrying out Hitler's orders? These are issues that a higher-level course in modern German or European history simply must consider in detail. (A useful selection of essays addressing these and other questions can be found in Donald L. Niewyk's anthology, The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, about which I will have more to say below.) Most students in a freshman survey, however, lack both the level of historical knowledge and the degree of theoretical sophistication necessary to make much sense of these controversies, important as they are. |
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Even if there were enough time available in a typical freshman survey course to address these controversies in detail, as most assuredly there is not, there would also be a risk that emphasizing complexity would only cause students at this level to decide that they will never understand this material and might as well give up trying. While none of them read postmodern literary theory, most of them seem to subscribe at least passively to the postmodern view that there is no central narrative, only a chorus of competing claims. In order to motivate them to make the effort to understand, therefore, we have no choice but to try to make them care. We can make them care if and only if we can get them to see the actors in these historical events as specific people, as human beings like them in every essential way, not as numbers on a table of casualties or names on a list of criminal defendants. The most workable strategy under the circumstances, therefore, is to arouse student interest in the topic, then to give them a taste of its complexity. Students with a real aptitude for history will be inclined to probe deeper. Students whose one and only history course this will be will at least have learned something lasting about what happened in the past and gained greater insight into some of the events taking place in their own world. In an effort to achieve this, I have found the following approaches useful in teaching the Shoah to freshmen in a Western Civilization survey. I am quite certain that they would be of use, to varying degrees, in teaching high school students as well. Most introductory surveys do not afford sufficient time to use all of these approaches. Depending on the time and resources available, however, one or more of them might be useful to arouse student involvement in this topic. And each, in its own way, would provide a potential springboard for deeper analysis in a more advanced history course. |
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Student Presentations on Holocaust Survivors | |
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Early in the semester, I let students know that I will be looking for volunteers to make classroom presentations on Holocaust survivors personally known to them. The assignment is to tell that person's story as clearly and in as much detail as possible. The early notice gives a student the chance to confer with other family members to nail down details. In some cases, students use the time to interview the survivor or relatives who knew the survivor better than the student does. In one case, this project prompted a family reunion at which the survivor spoke for the first time to family members about his experiences and allowed his reminiscences to be filmed by a niece. The advanced notice of the assignment also gives interested students time to obtain photographs or other mementoes for use in their presentation. |
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The value of this assignment for the presenters is obvious. Less obvious is the very real value of these presentations for the "audience" – students who in many instances know very little about the topic but whose interest is aroused by the fact that people they know are making the presentations. There is nothing abstract or dry about hearing friends or acquaintances tell about the ordeals or deaths of their own grandparents, great-aunts, and cousins. I have learned that, although students cannot fairly be presumed to care about things they don't know much about, if you give them a chance to find out how real people were affected by a historical event, you will often find that they can care very much indeed.1 |
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For example, one of my students talked about the experiences of her grandfather, who along with his siblings was hidden in Occupied France by Gentile families. (Their parents and many family friends were murdered at Auschwitz.) My student had family photos that I had made into overhead transparencies for her presentation, making her family seem more tangible and real than they would otherwise have been. Her grandfather's book about his experiences during the war would also be excellent for use with students, probably especially with students younger than my freshmen, because it makes this piece of history quite vividly real without as many horrifying details as the accounts of camp survivors invariably contain. It is engagingly written and illustrated, as well.2 |
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Another student told the story of two of her mother's elderly cousins, victims of Dr. Mengele's infamous twins experiments at Auschwitz. (Amazingly, they were still alive, living in the United States. She had interviewed them for the purpose of giving this presentation.) That year's class contained several professional sophisticates of the type occupying the back row of many a history class, much too cool to be impressed by any mere lecture or discussion. It was obvious, however, that even they found this presentation just as riveting as the rest of the class did. For once they could not withhold their attention. |
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The opportunity to make these presentations has prompted several shy and under-confident students who seldom participate in class to make themselves heard for the first time, always to good effect. And the presentations have prompted questions from students who had seldom or never asked questions before. Of course, survivors of the Shoah are a vanishing resource, but for that very reason it is vital to have their stories told while they are still known to people who love them and who can make classmates care about their stories, too. Obviously not all campuses have large numbers of students who have personally known a Holocaust survivor, but at Boston University I have never had trouble assembling enough volunteers, although with each passing year the supply will undoubtedly dwindle. In a college or university where such resources are unlikely to be available, a possible alternative would be to arrange for a local survivor to speak to students. (Local or national survivors groups would be one resource for this approach.) Clearly, eyewitness accounts of events that happened long ago have their obvious shortcomings as objective history, but for sparking interest they are uniquely effective. |
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Documentary Film on the Ghettos and the Camps | |
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Film is a resource that can be used in addition to the presentations discussed above or as a substitute for them, where presenters are not available. While I have no doubt that films like Schindler's List can be used in the classroom to good effect, I prefer to use documentary film to drive home the reality of the Shoah. There are two reasons for this preference. The first is a personal conviction that what really happened in history is compelling enough without embellishment. The second, and stronger reason, is awareness of the presence of the so-called Holocaust Denial movement on the Internet. Most of our students spend far more time online than we want to think about, and they are less critical about sources of information than they should be. It is vitally important, therefore, that we make sure they know just how good the evidence for the Shoah really is. (I will have more to say on this subject below.) In this respect documentary film has obvious advantages over dramatic film. |
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One excellent resource is a set of five short films about survivors distributed by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation under the title "Broken Silence." They are available on a DVD.3 Each of these independently produced documentaries contains interviews with survivors and appropriate visual documentation. Each of these films has much to recommend it. None of them can be shown in their entirety within the timeframe of a fifty-minute class because they run about an hour in length, but several can usefully be shown without their concluding material in one class period. The films are significantly different, so an instructor can choose the material that best introduces the issues to be addressed in later discussion. The theme of our two-semester freshman survey is "The Modernization of the Western World." By the time we consider the Shoah, our students have read about and discussed modernization theory, the process of socialization, and the Wars of Religion. They have also seen the film recounting Milgram's "Obedience" experiments. I looked, therefore, for accounts of how officials cleared the ghettos and what happened in the factories of death. One of my colleagues, whose approach particularly emphasizes the Eastern Front of the Second World War, has used the Russian film Children of the Abyss to great effect. An instructor interested in using films should perform the depressing task of watching them all in order to select the portions most appropriate to the intended discussions. |
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For an upper-division course with fewer centuries to cover, or in a course with a format that allows for classes longer than fifty minutes, an instructor could enjoy the luxury of showing one film in its entirely, then addressing in discussion issues like how the film-maker shaped the narrative, how the memories of survivors who speak in the film may have been affected by the passage of time or later events. Students who have chosen to enroll in higher-level history courses need to understand these issues and generally find them far more compelling than does the average freshman. |
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Of the films in this series, the most artistically made film is surely the Hungarian film Eyes of the Holocaust. This would probably be the one most appropriate for younger students. For my purposes, however, the film that seemed most useful was Some Who Lived, a Spanish-language film of interviews with survivors living in Argentina and Uruguay. Students instantly forge an emotional connection with the interviewed survivors because of their simple dignity and the barely controlled anguish with which they narrate the traumatic events of their childhoods. When I have used this film, one student after another in later discussions mentioned being touched by the obvious struggle of these dignified elderly men and women to maintain their composure while relating horrific events that had occurred a half a century earlier but that still remained unhealed wounds. |
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Another advantage of using Some Who Lived is that it encourages participation by students who might otherwise be left out of the experience. All of the films in this collection have English subtitles, because none of the interviews were conducted in English. The Hungarian, Rumanian, and Polish survivors interviewed in Some Who Lived had been living for decades in South America, so these interviews were conducted in Spanish. Following subtitles in a second language is much more difficult than in one's native tongue. In a showing of this film, however, it is the native speakers of English who are following (without difficulty) the subtitles, while native speakers of Spanish merely listen to the dialogue instead. My Spanish-speakers clearly enjoyed being the experts who were consulted in subsequent discussion about matters like foreign accents, vocabulary oddities, accuracy of the subtitles, and so on. Several of them, including students whose English is quite good, took a much more active part in the discussion than they normally did; and I don't believe that this was a coincidence. |
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Seeing this or any of the other films I have mentioned is not, to put it mildly, a comfortable experience. The survivor accounts are emotionally wrenching, and the photos and newsreel footage of ghetto clearances, emaciated camp inmates, and mass graves are very distressing. For these very reasons, film makes an extremely powerful impression on students who see it. Last semester one of my colleagues taught some of my students in the period following the lecture at which Some Who Lived was shown. When he saw me later in the day, he said, "What did you do to them? They were so quiet and withdrawn!" In discussion sections, one student after another said that the film was well worth seeing, horrifying as it was, because "now I really understand just how bad this was." An instructor using any of these films has to be prepared for deeply emotional reactions. But getting students to discuss the issues raised by these films is never difficult. |
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Student Debates: Why Did This Happen? | |
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This activity enables the instructor to undertake a more theoretical approach once the vital work of securing emotional involvement has already been done. Our curriculum uses three selections from Donald Niewyk's The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation.4 Our students read Robert Jay Lifton on the Nazi doctors, Christopher Browning on the "ordinary men" who rounded up Jews, and Daniel Goldhagen on "Hitler's Willing Executioners." I give my students a written assignment: they must come to class with a summary of the argument which to their minds best explains the "why" of the Shoah and a statement about why they chose it. (Fewer and fewer freshmen are skilled at recognizing and summarizing an author's argument, so this is valuable practice of a task they must master for academic success.) They know that they will be expected to debate students who chose differently. I begin the class by asking for one volunteer for each perspective to read his or her paper aloud, and then open the floor for rejoinders. While sometimes slow to develop, these debates usually become quite spirited after a while. |
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Using these three arguments facilitates discussion of the perspectives taken by their authors. Lifton approaches the subject from the point of view of individual psychology, Browning from the perspective of group dynamics (social psychology), and Goldhagen from a more traditionally historical perspective. Survey students seldom notice this on their own but can be prompted to see and discuss the differences. What are the advantages, disadvantages, and biases of each approach? Browning and Goldhagen use essentially the same evidence to reach very different conclusions. Asking students how this could occur prompts serious consideration of the use of evidence, a subject difficult to handle usefully within the constraints of a freshman survey course. |
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One aspect that hooks in students on the periphery of the early discussion is the question of whether or not such a thing could happen again. The logic of Goldhagen's argument suggests that this was a unique historical event, while the Lifton and Browning arguments suggest that it may not have been. Once this aspect emerges, as it always does, it is no longer possible for most students to regard this as an abstract issue that has nothing to do with their lives. After all, at least some of them have been reading about Darfur or about suicide bombers and understand that this issue is very much alive today. Invariably, one or more students will say so, prompting a discussion of just how relevant these contemporary conflicts are. Some students also seem to enjoy reaching a consensus that each of the arguments we are debating accounts for some of the events of the Shoah better than others; this is a valuable lesson in evaluating historical theories, better learned by doing than by being shown. |
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Did the Shoah Really Happen? Evaluating Sources and Evidence | |
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Although I never ask my students to look for Holocaust Denial sites on the Internet, invariably I find that some of them have seen these sites. Today's freshmen rely a great deal more on the Internet than on printed sources for their information, and they can be disturbingly uncritical absorbers of "information" that they find online. More and more students seem to believe that it is not possible to choose among contending claims for truth: all kinds of claims are "out there" and may be valid. This poses a problem for teaching the Shoah: it appears to some students that if people are going to so much trouble to claim that it never happened, who is to say that it did? It also poses a more general problem for the teaching of history: who is to say that anything really happened? Why are we bothering to teach them a collection of historical "facts" that might or might not be true? |
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An invaluable resource for approaching this quandary is Shermer and Grobman's Denying History.5 It gives a vivid account of the Holocaust Denial movement, an excellent summary of the evidence, and a very useful discussion of how we know for sure that any given historical event actually took place. For a course more advanced than the survey level it would be extremely useful for detailed discussion. If the relentless march of the freshman survey syllabus permits no time for a discussion of the book, then it can simply be mentioned to students as a resource, along with a quick account of its approach. If more time is available, however, it can serve as the basis of a useful classroom discussion on Holocaust Denial, the use of evidence in history, and the evaluation of partisan sources of historical information. These are issues that should at least be addressed briefly even in a freshman survey course, so why not address them here? |
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Some of the illustrations in Denying History make useful overhead transparencies for classroom use. When I have used this approach, I start my students out by asking them how we know that Napoleon existed, then how we know that the American Civil War took place. Their initial response is guarded. I believe they consider questioning such obvious facts pointless and suspect that they are being led into a trap of some kind. But after a while they warm to the task. What pieces of evidence do we lack about these events? Should we doubt that they happened? This leads naturally to Denying History and its mobilization of evidence that the Shoah did in fact take place, some of which we discuss in class. Students are then ready to discuss a few of the claims made by Holocaust Deniers and to assess their validity. They are also ready to discuss the possible motives for denial and the criteria that should be used in evaluating a given website as a source of information about history. (This topic, obviously, is at least as useful for making students aware of attempts to influence them on current events as it is for evaluating historical information from the Web.) Invariably, several students ask for full particulars on Denying History because they want to read it for themselves. I use a copy of this book as the prize in my Spring essay contest; it is invaluable not only for understanding the truth about the Shoah but also for understanding a great deal more about history, partisanship, and research. |
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Conclusion: Helping Students to Think About the Shoah | |
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Ignorance and callousness are two very different things. One reason for student indifference to many of the topics they encounter in history survey courses is ignorance; they know very little about a topic, so they fail to see what possible relevance it can have to their lives. Those of us who teach freshman survey courses can be cynical about this, and go through the motions of lecturing on topics we regard as important while feeling that we are casting our pearls before swine. Or we can give students a real chance to care and learn about these topics by drawing them in. Few of them will take our word for it that these topics are important, but many of them will become interested if they can make an emotional connection to historical figures as real people or see historical events as instances of problems that continue in their world today. |
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My final paper assignment asks students to pick a topic or event we have studied and explain how it has changed their view of the world. Free to select whatever they want, a surprising number of students pick the Shoah. They write about how it has made them think about the cruelty of which mankind is capable, about scapegoats, about how people can be influenced to do wrong, about government propaganda, about how people rationalize evil. They frequently say that they are now more aware of the continued prevalence of ethnic cleansing and ideologically justified violence than they were before. These papers are always thoughtful; they represent gratifying evidence that the course has actually had some effect on the way my students think about the world. Within the limitations of a freshman survey course, what could be better than that? |
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Notes
1 In my experience, this is equally true of teaching the Civil Rights Movement. Most of my freshmen have heard about it many times before but are not particularly engaged by the subject. Using personal accounts of life under Jim Crow, music, and photos of specific people who lost their lives in the struggle makes a big difference in student attitudes toward the material. For the last, I use overhead photos of the four young girls who died on Birmingham Sunday, giving them names, ages, and detailed identities. This always has a visible impact on students who haven't really thought about this before. Although it makes me feel ancient, I always mention having ridden on segregated buses as a child, because this too always makes a visible impression. This happened within the lifetime of their professor, not in the ancient world!
2 Simon Jeruchim, Hidden in France: A Boy's Journey Under the Nazi Occupation. (McKinleyville, CA: Fithian Press, 2005) My thanks go to Simon Jeruchim's granddaughter, Talia Abrahams, for introducing me to this wonderful book.
3 For more information, see the website of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The DVD is fairly widely available; I purchased my copy from Amazon.
4 Donald L. Niewyk, The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation 3rd. Ed. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003. The three chapters we use are Section II: The Motivations of the Killers.
5 Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
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