Holocaust survivors are dying out – how should we preserve their legacy?

The mass, industrialised murder of 11 million people (six million Jews, five million others) within living memory has left a stain on the human race.

It has also provided us with a constant reminder of the depths to which, in certain economic and political circumstances, a modern, “civilised” society can descend.

Now, 80 years on, we are losing the last of the eyewitnesses to the Holocaust. The few remaining survivors of the Nazi death camps – who would so often visit schools and universities to share their unimaginable experiences and show the camp numbers that the Nazis tattooed on their arms – are dying out.

When we have lost such important testimony, how will we teach the younger generations about the Holocaust and its lessons? To answer this question, I turned to professor Henry Maitles, renowned Jewish educationalist and expert in Holocaust teaching at the University of the West of Scotland.

“Not only are the last survivors dying out, but the last people who came over in the Kindertransport are also dying out”, says Maitles, referring to the 10,000 mainly Jewish children who were sent from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain in the “children’s transport” (Kindertransport) in 1938 and 1939. “If you were 10 years of age in 1938, you will be in your 90s now”, he observes.

“There are still some such people alive and living in Scotland, and who are willing to go into schools and give talks, but very soon they’re all going to die out.”

Sad though it is to be losing such important testimony, Maitles points out that researchers have, for some years, been preparing for the inevitable loss of the remaining survivors of the Nazi genocide. “There are a number of collaborations around the world to have testimony recorded on video”, he explains.

“The best of these is the Shoah foundation at the University of Southern California (USC), which has collected thousands of eyewitness testimonies.” Founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994, this excellent resource can, Maitles explains, be accessed by schools, by agreement with USC.

Jews are led out of their building at gunpoint in the Warsaw ghetto.

So, what is the current position of Holocaust education in Scotland’s schools? In the absence of a national curriculum, there is, the professor explains, “no necessity for Scottish schools to teach anything about the Holocaust”.

Nevertheless, even in the absence of a statutory requirement to teach about Hitler’s genocide (such as exists in England, for example), there is quite a lot going on in Scottish schools. Teaching of the Holocaust in Scotland typically falls into two categories, Maitles explains.

IN primary 7, Scotland’s children tend to be told about the Holocaust as part of teaching about the Second World War. “There is discussion about the right age to do Holocaust education”, says the professor. “However, there is some evidence that primary teachers, with their ability to look at the Holocaust in a multidisciplinary manner, can teach it more effectively than early years secondary, when the students are already in their subject bunkers.

‘‘At secondary level, the historian can talk about the Holocaust without looking at the lessons of it. The religious and moral education class can look at the moral issues without putting it in a historical context.”

In particular, Maitles observes, primary teachers are often better placed to draw upon various works of art and literature concerned with the Holocaust.

However, he shares the concerns of many people that Scotland’s primary schools, which, in the past used The Diary of Anne Frank as their main literary tool for teaching the Holocaust, have shifted to John Boyne’s controversial 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Mark Herman’s 2008 film version.

“The research we carried out suggested that, when the teacher used Boyne’s book, the main sympathy that the children felt was for the camp commander of Auschwitz and his wife.” This is understandable in some ways, he adds, “because they are portrayed as grieving parents at the end of the book”.

Often Scottish schools, both primary and secondary, opt to teach the Holocaust as an all-school project connected to Holocaust Memorial Day. While, Maitles says, it is “better to have this than not to have it”, the problem with such teaching is that it often isolates the Holocaust as a moral question, rather than putting it in the historical and political context of the rise of the Nazis and the onset of the Second World War.

In addition to this, Scottish secondary schools often teach the Holocaust in first, second or third year, in connection with the annual Lessons from Auschwitz trip organised by the Holocaust Memorial Trust.

This project, which is sponsored and supported by the Scottish Government, sends two students from every secondary school in Scotland to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

Research by Maitles and his colleague Paula Cowan suggests that the children who go on the Auschwitz trips tend to return committed to activism around the subject of Holocaust education, and wider activism against anti-Semitism, racism and fascism.

“Our research shows that, in the best cases, the kids who come back from the Auschwitz visits hold meetings with whole year groups in their schools.

“In many cases, they go down to a local primary school and talk about their experience.

‘‘There’s nothing like a couple of 16 or 17-year-olds going into a primary school to talk to the primary 7s about Auschwitz, what they found there and what it’s like to be there.”

IN addition to such projects, Maitles speaks positively about the Vision Schools Scotland programme. Launched in the Scottish Parliament, with cross-party support, the initiative, which receives funding from various external agencies, supports the development of Holocaust education among teachers.

Interestingly, the research done by Maitles and his colleagues suggests that “kids who learn about the Holocaust at school develop better attitudes towards almost every other social grouping”.

This is true, he adds, not only of children’s attitudes to other ethnic groups (be they, for example, Asian, black or Jewish), but also of boys’ attitudes towards girls and women, and of pupils’ views towards LGBTQ+ people.

There are, says Maitles, “questions of pedagogy” when teaching the Holocaust. The angle from which the Nazi genocide is taught should depend, he says, on the composition of the class. “If I was teaching a class in which the majority of pupils were Muslims”, he says, “I would start with the Muslim rescuers of Jews.”

The professor says there is a great benefit, in certain educational contexts, of emphasising the fact that “many Muslims, in various countries decided to protect Jews from the Nazis”. Indeed, he points out, “there are a lot of Muslims in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem [the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem].”

Although Maitles would like to see a greater emphasis placed on both Holocaust education and pedagogical approaches to it in Scottish schools, he is not in favour of it becoming a compulsory part of the curriculum. “The evidence from England is that, if it becomes a national curriculum issue, it gets shoehorned into something like two periods, and is taught poorly”, he says.

Rather than forcing often reluctant teachers in certain subjects to teach a statutory minimum on the Holocaust, the professor prefers a “hearts and minds” approach. “We need, through our teacher education institutions, to make sure that the subject is at the forefront.”

The need for a renewed emphasis on Holocaust education comes not only from the fact that we are losing the last generations of survivors, says Maitles.

The current rise of the far-right around the world, from the United States and Brazil, to various countries across Europe, is a frightening reminder of the need to learn the lessons of the Nazi genocide.

As a Jew, and as one of Scotland’s foremost experts on the Holocaust, Maitles is deeply concerned by the current rise in hatred of minorities, not least refugees, migrants and Muslims. He is, of course, also horrified by the Judeophobia of the far-right in the United States.

The murder of 11 people, and the injuring of another six, by an anti-Semitic gunman at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October of last year was the deadliest attack ever perpetrated against the Jewish community in the US.

It came a little over a year after the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which one anti-racist was murdered in a neo-Nazi terrorist attack, and a synagogue besieged by a fascist mob.

Maitles watched the Charlottesville events with disbelief. “People with swastikas marching around the town in a torch-lit procession. People giving the fascist salute.

“Jews being taken out the back of their synagogue, told to take their skullcaps off and told not to go out of their houses ... I never thought we’d see such things again.”

Add to Charlottesville and Pittsburgh the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of European far-right leaders such Hungarian president Viktor Orban and Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini, and it is, surely, impossible to disagree with Maitles’ contention that, now more than ever, we need a stronger focus on learning the lessons of the Holocaust.