No longer estranged: learning to teach the Holocaust in Poland

ABSTRACT

Here, the author analyzes how Polish teachers confront a traumatic hidden wartime history of the Holocaust. In this exploratory study, the author analyzes interviews, field notes, and survey responses by 60 teachers who participated in a Holocaust preparation program in Poland during the summer of 2010. The article presents and discusses data using the theoretical perspectives of Halbwachs and Felman to make sense of what the teachers presented. The teachers were motivated to learn about the Holocaust out of moral, historical, and professional obligations. They had personal stories to tell about why they sought out professional development and struggled with defining who is a Jew, i.e. Polonizing Jews or making them seem ‘normal’ to students. Findings from this research have the potential to inform professional development in other communities that have suffered traumatic national histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective memory
• Holocaust education
• Poland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, summer 1950.

2. M. Gross, “Rewriting the nation,” 213–245; Szuchta and Trojański, Holocaust; Tych, Dlugi Cien Zaglady.

3. Stevick, “Historical and Cultural Dimensions of Resistance to Holocaust Education Policy in Central and Eastern Europe,” 67–72.

4. Himka, “Review on the 1032–1933 famine in Ukraine,” 683–694.

5. Szuchta, ibid.

6. M. Gross, ibid.

7. Szuchta and Trojański, Holocaust.

8. Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity, 3; Davies, God's Playground; Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz.

9. Snyder, 2010, Bloodlands.

10. Strauss and Corbin, “Basics of Qualitative Research”; Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook.

11. Brubaker, 1996, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe.

12. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 54.

13. All names cited are pseudonyms.

14. http://www.irenasendler.org/awards.asp, Accessed January 1, 2013.

15. Renan, 1882, What is a Nation?

16. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 25.

17. Nora, Les Lieux de Memoir.

18. Nora, Ibid., 14.

19. Friedlander, The Years of Extermination.