Why did it take 15 years after the Holocaust for the world to begin hearing survivors’ testimonies?
What makes the Holocaust such a singular event among so many other mass tragedies in modern history? Why does education about the Holocaust feel more important today than ever? Renowned Holocaust historian, author, and longtime Facing History partner Dr. Michael Berenbaum explored these questions with Facing History’s Senior Director of Jewish Education, Rabbi Yehudah Potok, in our recent webinar Historical Memory: Reflecting on 80 Years of Holocaust Education.
The Limitations of Language
Both Holocaust survivors and scholars often explain how the singularity of the Holocaust required the invention of new words and phrases, because existing language could not capture the extremities of survivors’ experiences. Berenbaum illustrates how words like “hunger” and “cold” did not accurately communicate the conditions victims endured in Nazi death camps, a concept scholar Larry Langer also discusses in the documentary Lawrence L. Langer: A Life in Testimony. As Langer began listening to the stories of survivors, he coined new terms to capture their experiences—such as “the choiceless choice,” a phrase describing the unimaginable decisions those in the death camps were forced to make in order to physically survive.
Not only did Holocaust survivors lack the vocabulary to describe the unimaginable of what they had been through, but immediately following the Holocaust many were also living as refugees in new countries where they were suddenly required to learn new languages. Trying to express the horrors of their experience in an unfamiliar tongue—along with the early reluctance of others to believe and listen to the stories survivors did attempt to share—created even more impediments to communicating what happened during the Holocaust. It took more than a decade after the camps were liberated before the world began to learn about the experiences of survivors in earnest.
The Centrality of Survivors’ Voices in Holocaust Education
The personal accounts of survivors are the foundation of Holocaust education. Berenbaum recognizes the Eichmann Trial of 1961—when senior SS officer Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel for his crimes during the Holocaust—as the first instance of documenting survivor testimony. Eichmann’s victims testified to his crimes during the trial, and these testimonies were filmed and then broadcast daily on televisions across the world.
Yale University began collecting Holocaust survivor testimonies in 1979 for what would eventually become the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony, now a collection of 44,000 recorded survivor testimonies. Just a few years earlier, in 1976, the first Facing History lessons about the Holocaust—what would develop into our Holocaust and Human Behavior curriculum—were being taught in classrooms in Brookline, Massachusetts. These early lessons also centered accounts from survivors. Berenbaum names Holocaust survivor and Night author Elie Wiesel as vital to transforming the perception of Holocaust survivors from victims to witnesses with critical lessons to share that can impact our collective future.
Keeping Holocaust Education Relevant
How much can we learn about our own moment in time by studying the circumstances that paved the road to the Holocaust? Berenbaum urges educators to focus on the years leading up to the Holocaust, 1919 to 1933, to better understand the human behavior that could lead to an atrocity of this magnitude. Facing History’s Holocaust and Human Behavior collection similarly emphasizes the ideologies, economic factors, political events, and societal behaviors that emerged at the end of WWI and paved the road to the mass murder of six million Jews, along with millions of other non-Jewish victims. When students raise questions about the fragility of modern democracy, it is important to examine case studies of the ideologies and circumstances that caused previous democracies to fall.
The Power of Story
As Holocaust education mandates expand in the US, Berenbaum has a simple answer to the question of how to breathe life into history that might feel ancient for young people: story. Literature, films, testimony, and museums—mediums that use narrative to teach the particulars and universals of the Holocaust—are the best way to help young students grasp the specific nature of the Holocaust, its lessons for the world we now inhabit, and the future we hope to build.
The Work Ahead
The sharp rise of antisemitism over the last ten years has surprised many people, including some Holocaust scholars. But Berenbuam insists that teaching the Holocaust is even more necessary now than ever before because it provides “a counter-testimony” to those propagating hatred. The Holocaust becomes a lens through which we can understand our past, present, and future. “It’s a particular story that happened in a particular moment in time to a particular people, in this case the Jews, but it’s also an event that has very deep and profound implications and speaks not only of that time, but to all time.” Learning about the Holocaust makes moral demands upon us today “to become active citizens, to become upstanders.”
Keep an eye out for these upcoming professional development opportunities and forthcoming Holocaust teaching resources from Facing History:
- Teaching the Holocaust and Human Behavior Summer Seminars
- Resources for teaching Holocaust and Human Behavior
- An ELA resource guide to teaching the Literature of the Holocaust
- A discussion guide for the documentary Lawrence L. Langer: A Life in Testimony to help educators and students prepare to use Holocaust testimony
- A new landing page for our Teaching with Testimony resources, which includes a collection of survivor profiles, video testimonies, speaker visit resources, and a classroom-ready lesson plan
