A Few Thoughts on Holocaust Education, Post October 7, 2023

On October 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel in a massive rampage, I traveled to Warsaw for the first time in my life. I was about to work on the grounds of the former Warsaw Ghetto with Holocaust experts from all over Europe, to jointly develop on-site educational practices. In the weeks before, I had delved deeply into the testimonies collected in the Ringelblum Archive and into how the Nazis facilitated deprivation, deportations, and killing. I had to stop and start several times as I read (the Warsaw Ghetto) testimonies, not the news (about the attack), struggling with the implications of what I was reading. On October 8th, as I walked through the Polin Museum, looking at blown-up photographs of the utter destruction of the surrounding area in 1943–1944, I wondered how many days or weeks it would be before the Israel Defense Force's response to the Hamas attack would be publicly compared to what the Nazis did, equating Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, Israelis to Nazi occupiers. It was not even a day, and it was before there was any military response, disconnecting reaction from action and disregarding the implications of the latter.

Upon my return from Warsaw, with my work done, it began to sink in. I was in a confused state of mind, mentally shaking, crying heavily at times, wondering why the shock waves reached me, an Austrian of non-Jewish descent, with no history of victims, rescuers, or resistance in my family when it comes to the Holocaust. Why did it hit me? And why so hard? I couldn't come up with an explanation, except for one: with multiple perpetrators, SS and Wehrmacht soldiers, and certainly many compromised identities in my family tree, my reaction must be somehow related to my ancestors’ share in the Nazi past. If the Holocaust was the reference point for the shock of what should never happen again to Jews, especially not in Israel, then I was shaken by my share of that reference point – not as a victim, but as a descendant of the perpetrators. My cognitive and embodied memory of belonging to the perpetrator side of the Holocaust made me feel the outflow of the shock waves. I am compromised when it comes to the reference point of shock and thus implicated when it comes to the Hamas attack.

Seven weeks later, less has now been written about what happened on October 7 as about how Israel reacted. Israeli society is struggling to bring the two together, while the focus in the rest of the world has largely shifted to a discussion of how appropriate or not Israel’s response is. Our focus here lies not in this debate, but rather on Holocaust education and antisemitism. But we cannot pretend that October 7th has no relevance here, even though most of the articles were written and finished prior to it and the war in Gaza. So we as educators must consider today what recent events mean and how our work has changed.

Much of the current debate is highly politicized and often results in people reinforcing their own positions. We seem to have left little room for honestly allowing oneself to be puzzled, to try to make sense of both the attack and the reactions in their full complexity. For this issue, what is largely missing from the public discourse is a discussion of what the October 7 attack must have meant to those who were affected by it, physically, mentally, and in their trust in a certain degree of security in their immediate environment. What is rarely discussed is that most non-Jews face an invisible barrier in making this assessment – their lack of experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Following the public debate about the meaning and the repercussions of the October 7 attack, often informed by a somewhat superficial scheme of oppressor and oppressed, I see the needle of the ethical compass spinning wildly, moral and political thought mixing dangerously. As a result, the dehumanization of humans killing and being killed has reached a new stage. This includes the Palestinians, who are sometimes seen less as people than as a token for political statements. For some, their body count has become the ticker for all those who collect evidence against Israel. While heartfelt concern for the suffering of Palestinian civilians should be taken seriously, and legitimate questions can be raised about Israel’s response, the debate is often tainted with or informed by – knowingly or not – antisemitic tropes. As a result, one can easily lose sight of both the implications of the suffering and the complexity of the issue, historically and morally.

In his newly published 2002 correspondence with German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani, German-born Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider points out that Israel owes its existence as much to international morality after the Holocaust as to its Zionist identity. The latter would “fall back to a colonialist-fundamental body without the naked, not to be relativized, morality of the Jewish claim to a finally secure life.”¹ And then again, Israel without Zion would just be New York, Sznaider states. In his response, Kermani claims that as much as this is convincing for Israel and its Western allies, the Arabic side can’t agree to such a hermetic narrative. So terror and reaction to terror will continue. They conclude that it would signify progress if both sides at least demythologized their enmity while continuing the fight.

As intense and heated as both the discussion and the slide into antisemitism currently feel, none of this is new as such. However, when it comes to the debate in academia, it is, among other things, the result of an ongoing development that has also seen many short-circuits between political activism and the scholarly world. However one may position oneself within this debate, from a more general perspective, Holocaust education finds itself in a discursive field of tension between postcolonial studies, human rights education, and educational work critical of racism and antisemitism. These challenges also extend along a discursive axis of the “universal” and the “particular.” While literature and memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg has stated that the spectrum of memory could allow all of this to be brought together in a multidimensional perspective,² sociologist Natan Sznaider has argued that looking at vanishing points of memory might be more appropriate. This model allows for discussing difficult pasts in their parallels and differences, both in their particular and universal elements.³ As always, such concepts are not only influenced by intellectual thinking, but also by underlying beliefs. Looking at the current discourse and the mood in the media and in politics, one could argue that Sznaider's concept of keeping things separate in order to deepen our understanding strongly echoes a reality and thus may prove to be more functional. Conversely, Rothberg's idea that solidarity and remembrance are not a zero-sum game, however admirable from a universal point of view, risks being misinterpreted as a waiver to disregard the particularity of the Holocaust. Undoubtedly we need both, and undoubtedly there is still much to be unraveled, both in our understanding of history and memory, especially when it comes to making progress in resolving conflicts that are still fueled by a challenging legacy.

At the same time, antisemitism and the legacy of the Holocaust is not something that entered the public and educational discourse on October 7th. We cannot shy away from a deeper analysis of the nature of the debates at the recent German documenta art fair. Several art pieces had been identified as being antisemitic or promoting antisemitic sentiment in an agit-prop mode, most prominently through using terrorist propaganda film material. Indonesian artists and curators provocatively claimed that the critics were racist and politically motivated, imposing censorship on their works along “Western paradigms,” a view backed by the festival’s leadership. They claimed that the critics’ actual goal was to block the discussion of colonization crimes in the Global South. Holocaust and World War II references also fuel the legitimacy discourse in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, where both sides make flawed Nazi references. In both cases, the debates and narratives are informed by and linked to simplistic references to the Holocaust as much as they echo aspects of oppression in imperialist and postcolonial discourse. Also, when antisemitic tropes fueled conspiracy claims during the Covid pandemic, they referenced thought patterns of oppression and powerlessness.

All of this suggests the need for two steps at once: (1) We must focus on the specificity of what informed the Holocaust, rather than falling for simplistic generalizations that tailor antisemitism to fit other forms of othering. This does not do justice to the Holocaust, nor to other genocides, nor to antisemitism, nor to racism. (2) We need to explore how we can establish a dialogue between Holocaust and postcolonial studies in which there is a genuine openness to each other's truth claims, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued,⁴ regardless of whether or not we agree with each other. To this end, it might be helpful to identify a common theme, perhaps called “civilizational processes that endanger civilization.” Acknowledging that traditions of interpretation and thought are themselves subject to constant change should make it possible to abandon strict frames or patterns and move from emotionally charged debates to more productive conversations.

But what does all this mean for Holocaust education as such? Because the rise in antisemitic expression, thought, and action is significant, educators continue to struggle with how best to respond, even though this is nothing new. Many may also wonder what education should look like in the future, now that “Never Again” has lost of power. Although for the first time in a long time, this line might be understood better in its relevance to Jews. We are all living in a post-October 7 world, and we are only a few weeks into this new era. The unpacking will take time. The recovery will take even longer, and the transitions in education that we may see will not be clear for some time. In any case, this can serve as a moment for us educators to rethink and reexamine our educational concepts and methods, to reevaluate our goals, and to put our educational principles and practices to the test. Can we maintain the idea that Holocaust education as such can combat antisemitism? How do we mitigate the risk of getting lost in the politicization of morality, and how do we respond to this in educational settings? How can we ensure that, in discussing the universal in the events of the Holocaust, its history, and its memory, we don't lose sight of the particular? Astonishingly, as scholars of the Swedish Segerstedt Institute found in their research, Holocaust education often lacks clear references to antisemitism.⁵ This might also hint at Holocaust education claiming a universal cause deductively, not inductively, thus weakening itself in its attempt to claim the human right for anyone to exist by drawing attention also to other genocides.

While all of this needs to be debated, I would like to suggest that right now there is a lot of evidence pointing to the need for better questions rather than better answers, for not being too sure, for unpacking doubts and insecurities, for a more honest gaze at who we are and how we tend to behave, for legitimizing vulnerability rather than striving for courage – in short, for humanistic values. We must not forget that education is valuable as such, as is understanding the Holocaust and how it relates to us today.

Although the articles in this issue were written and edited before October 7, it is easy to read the tensions of “universal” and “particular” between the lines, and even to see how several institutions are trying to respond to them in their practices, balancing the particular aspects of the Holocaust within the more universal context of learning about difficult pasts. And regardless of recent events, it is a necessity to keep asking what the application of the methods, concepts, and programs discussed means now and in the future. While this attitude is also influenced by the growing distance in time when it comes to the Holocaust, framed most prominently by the passing of survivors, it's not just a question of time. For all education, including Holocaust education, is inevitably in a state of flux, reacting and responding to an ever-changing environment, new social realities, and research foci.

In the opening article, Australian Holocaust Museums: From Particular to Universal, Avril Alba addresses these issues, drawing on the recent renewal of permanent exhibitions and related educational efforts at the Sydney Jewish Museum. She discusses them in the context of post-World War II human rights discourse, in relation to the traditions of Holocaust museums, and against a perceived need to address contemporary Australian issues more explicitly than in the past. These issues include the recognition and rights of Indigenous peoples and refugees, and also place Australia in its South Pacific context. The need to reference these issues in the Sydney Jewish Museum was more prominently formulated by the second and third generation than by the survivor generation itself. Starting from the scheme of the particular and the universal, Alba focuses on the museum's permanent exhibition, The Holocaust and Human Rights, which she co-curated.

In Amsterdam, a new institution will open its doors in March 2024. In the midst of the Jewish cultural quarter, the city will now also host the National Holocaust Museum of the Netherlands. In her article, Learning about the Holocaust: Opportunities and Challenges for the National Holocaust Museum in the Netherlands, Julia Sarbo outlines how the upcoming educational programing will build on the two threads of the permanent exhibition, commemorating the victims as individuals and addressing the systematic aspects of mass murder, which are discussed against the absence of democratic structures, focusing on the judiciary and law enforcement. As Sarbo argues in her article, the museum's educational approach responds to the specificity of the Dutch school system and brings students in the position of co-creators of their own learning. In terms of content and context, the programs at the National Holocaust Museum place the history of the Holocaust alongside other histories of injustice, namely colonialism and racism, injustices that Dutch youth today tend to think about more than the Shoah. In doing so, the programs help students recognize the ways in which the Holocaust is different, unique, and exceptional.

In her article on the use of survivor testimony, Testimony in Context, Andrea Szőnyi argues for the benefits of applying multimedia technology in educational settings, whether in a museum or classroom environment or at historical sites. Building on the extensive collection of survivor testimonies and life stories at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation), the Hungarian NGO Zachor uses and is involved in the development of related resources such as the iWitness platform and iWalks. Szőnyi illustrates how both formats can contribute to crucial educational aspects such as the localization of the past and how they strengthen students’ cognitive and affective empathy. She explains how this particular use of survivor testimony enables teachers to discuss the Holocaust in their classrooms, how its use contributes to building students’ skills, and what all of this means in a Hungarian context.

In neighboring Austria, which until the late 1980s hid from the spotlight in the shadow of post-Holocaust developments in Germany, the belated development of a sense of responsibility and a correspondingly broader culture of remembrance prevented major cultural institutions such as the Vienna City Museum – the Wien Museum – from making the Nazi period a permanent part of their work. It was only in the course of the institution's fundamental renewal and expansion that the Wien Museum integrated the Nazi period and the Holocaust into its recently reopened permanent exhibition. In their article, Remembering with Students: Insights from Two Pilot Education Projects at the Wien Museum about the Holocaust and Nazi Crimes, Farina Asche and Susan Plawecki describe what this new situation has meant for the education department and reflect on the realities of museum work. They talk about the challenges of developing programs about the Nazi past from scratch, how they distilled their own programming principles from many conversations with educational experts in the field, and how their new educational offerings began to take shape in an extended pilot phase. The two educators not only discuss the findings that informed their new programs, one on victim biographies and one on locating atrocities and placing them in their social context, but also identify elements that still need to be adopted and refined.

As an Austrian who has worked in the country's memorial museum environment, and because almost half of the contributions to this issue are embedded in an Austrian context, please allow me to reflect a bit more on this environment in relation to museum education and the Holocaust. While most students encounter aspects of the Nazi period at the country's main memorial site at the former Mauthausen concentration camp, they don't necessarily focus on the Holocaust there. This is because the camp's prisoner cohort was predominantly non-Jewish and related to the development of war, with the function of the camp seemingly not directly linked to the Holocaust. Despite this, it is important to note that the camp was used to kill Jews, whenever Jews were amongst the cohorts captured there, be it Polish intelligentsia, Soviet POW or Dutch resistance. And the extermination of European Jews both drove the war as much as the war created the environment for it, meaning that Mauthausen cannot easily be separated from the genocide of the Jews. The mass killing of those who survived the death marches to Mauthausen, evacuation transports from more Eastern camps towards the end of war, predominantly Hungarian Jews, was only halted by the defeat of the German Reich. These relationships to Mauthausen are oven overlooked. In addition, there is a tradition in the German-speaking world of using the larger framework of Nazi (rather “National Socialist”) crimes in order to offer a more holistic perspective. In educational practice, however, expanding the gaze to other victim groups often downplays the Holocaust, especially when the general frame is a national one in terms of where the crimes were committed.

Focusing on the Austrian soil as grounds of perpetration tends to disregard the Jews deported to be murdered in the east of Europe or puts a locally more prevalent victim group to the foreground. School visits at the second largest memorial, Schloss Hartheim – one of the six Nazi euthanasia killing centers of the Third Reich – focus on the more than 18,000 mentally ill and disabled people who were murdered there in a gas chamber. The Jewish victims among these cohorts and among the additional twelve thousand concentration camp prisoners and forced laborers who were murdered there are not largely addressed, although they were killed because they were Jewish not because of their medical record. In places like Hartheim, the Nazi perpetrators first established and “perfected” the method of mass killing by gas that was later used in Poland. And the Action Reinhardt camps were run and largely staffed by personnel from Hartheim and other Nazi euthanasia centers. Vienna's Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial bears the names of Mauthausen and Hartheim, and is thus somewhat more explicit about the role of these sites in the Holocaust than the very memorial sites themselves.

Walking through the streets of Vienna, where 90% of Austria's more than 180,000 Jews once lived, one finds the small and somewhat hidden Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (the DÖW, whose name is more in keeping with the idea of its founding and the identity of its founders than with broad-scale Austrian resistance during the Nazi period). Today, it is Austria's most important institution in the fight against right-wing extremism and antisemitism, however poorly equipped it is financially. There is also a well-known Jewish Museum with two branches, which tries to strike a balance between telling the history of Jewish culture and of the Holocaust. Last but not least, in the midst of a dozen imperial museums and institutions next to the infamous Heldenplatz, where Hitler addressed his fellow Austrians in the spring of 1938, behind the very balcony he climbed to be embraced by the cheering masses, there is currently the House of Austrian History, a comparatively small institution that is still searching for its permanent home in the city. It deals with the Austrian nation after 1918 and, within its significant spatial limitations, places a remarkable emphasis on Austria's struggle with its Nazi past. But what you won't find on the streets of Vienna until today is an Austrian Holocaust Museum. Thus, Austria lacks an institution that is not bound by a local focus, as memorials and city museums (rightly) are, does not overlook Holocaust aspects in “domestic” violence and murder, but that can concentrate on the larger story of the Holocaust and how it relates to Austria, e.g. in discussing Austrian responsibility for Nazi crimes committed throughout Europe. What is lacking is a working institution, not a monument, that is dedicated to the Austrian Jews who were murdered as well as to those who survived, but were not welcomed back.

In her contribution, “The Challenges of Doing Multidirectionality. Co-Researching the Own Practice on Holocaust Education in the City Museum of Linz”, Karin Schneider addresses the implications of this institutional lack and its effects on museum education. Beginning with what it means for a city museum, in her case that of Linz (the city where Hitler spent most of his youth), she reflects on pedagogical practices, the limitations of museum educators, and self-evaluates concrete experiences with diverse audiences. She describes the challenges she faces in opening a space for honest conversation about both a difficult past and antisemitism, and in trying to facilitate this communication. Schneider analyzes these challenges as a result of the lack of dealing with antisemitism in museum education in the Austrian context, especially when it comes to working with young people with non-Austrian family backgrounds, such as people from Southeastern Europe and, increasingly, the Middle East or Afghanistan. Using examples from the MemAct project, which I had the pleasure of designing and co-directing with her, Schneider openly discusses the struggles and issues she has faced in working with these audiences in relation to her own subject position. She suggests ways to connect experiences of exclusion as a migrant in Austria with its history of regional nationalist identity construction and history of antisemitism.

The “how” is also the focus of the article I had the honor of writing with my colleagues Yariv Lapid and Paul Salmons. In our contribution, In Search of Meaning and Relevance: Applying Participant-Centered Learning at Holocaust Sites, we outline what we have learned about establishing participant-centered modes of learning in education at historical sites, and how this has informed both our thinking and the ongoing development of our practice. Having begun our collaboration about ten years ago at the Mauthausen Memorial, our contribution delineates what was developed there and what has been added since. With an emphasis on the methodological aspects of our approach, we illustrate our work with examples from the Austrian context, which continues to be an important developmental and operational site for our work. At the same time, we draw on the general implications for the teacher-student relationship and reflect on core pedagogical aspects such as hierarchy, critical thinking, disequilibrium, and relevance.

The final piece in this issue's focus on Holocaust education is an interview with Andreas Brunner, conducted by Nathaniel Prottas. They discuss how QWIEN, the Viennese center for queer history, came to be, starting with Andreas’ personal activism and interest, pioneering research, and a first-of-its-kind collection of materials on the persecution of LGBTQI+people during the period of National Socialism in Vienna. A focus of the interview is the center's walking tours of the city, which draw on the power of relating to concrete sites in a cityscape that participants usually walk for other purposes. Emphasis is also placed on the fact that the documentation used is predominantly that of the perpetrators. It comes from trials, interrogation files, and medical reports, and thus strongly reflects the language of the perpetrators and their perspective on the persecuted. Brunner points to the intimacy of what the persecuted are forced to say and describe in their interrogations and calls for more sensitivity in this regard.

Dear readers, before you read the articles collected in this volume, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Nathaniel Prottas, who invited me to be the guest editor for this issue and deeply impressed me with his patience as well as his knowledge and skill in managing the editorial process. In my Austrian environment, it is rare for practitioners to be in this privileged position, and I would like to thank the Journal and its board for this opportunity. I hope you will find this issue interesting, enlightening, and perhaps even thought-provoking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wolfgang Schmutz

Wolfgang Schmutz is an education consultant and lecturer. He started his career in Holocaust education as a guide at Hartheim Castle, and later served as a co-head of education at the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria. He led joint practice development projects at Flossenbürg Memorial, Max-Mannheimer Study Center Dachau, and Hartheim Castle. Together with Karin Schneider, he ran the EU-sponsored project MemAct. He is working as an educational consultant for the USHMM traveling exhibition Some Were Neighbors in Germany. Teaming up with Paul Salmons, he offers symposia on participant-centered learning for organizations funded by the Claims Conference. He is adjunct professor of history for the University of Redlands' Salzburg program.

Notes

1 Kermani, and Sznaider. Israel, 58; Translation by author.

2 Rothberg, Multidirektionale Erinnerung.

3 Sznaider, Fluchtpunkte der Erinnerung.

4 Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method.

5 Pistone, et al, Education after Auschwitz.