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HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN PEDAGOGY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE 18
That “it remain[s] so relevant to so many different people” means that thousands of educators around the
world, even in “regions and countries not originally related to the events of the Holocaust, find it compelling
and meaningful” (p. 2). Surely, they share the dilemmas of how to teach this subject most effectively—
including the now especially pressing concern of how to teach it when the witnesses cannot visit classrooms
and offer testimony. Teaching about the Shoah is a daunting task today. How much more so will it be when
the survivors are no longer with us to humanize the grim statistics?
Currently, hundreds of scholars, researchers, and educators are examining the question of how best to
do this. In Treblinka and Sobibor, for example, archaeologists are examining mass graves through new,
non-invasive techniques that allow them “to record and examine topographies of atrocity” (Lebovic, 2015,
n.p.). Scientists are bringing technology to the effort, making laser recordings that create holograms of
the real people giving testimony—three-dimensional images that can then be projected onto a screen
in any classroom in the future, bringing the survivor to life, so to speak, as if he were really sitting there
and talking. For the past several years, “a group led by USC’s Shoah Foundation has been . . . creating
three-dimensional holograms of nearly a dozen people who survived Nazi Germany” (Rogers, 2013, n.p.).
The effect is quite eerie and quite real, and the hologram will even be pre-programmed with answers to
commonly asked questions about the Holocaust.
We also have many thousands of video and audiotaped testimonies, as well as the newest interactive apps,
which also bring the image and voice of the vitally important witness into the classroom. 1 These narratives
are and will always be crucial to our knowledge of individual experiences and of some of the complex
dilemmas confronted by the Jews during the Holocaust.
Yet those of us who grew up with survivors in our homes and communities long for something more intimate
than an enhanced understanding of the death camps, more personal than images that speak but cannot
be embraced. What can we add to our teaching to enrich our students’ affective as well as historical
knowledge?
Recently, archaeologists’ discoveries have reinforced the potential for the widespread study of fragments
left behind during the Holocaust, objects that, in their context, engage learners’ feelings. The research
teams at Sobibor have “found hundreds of artifacts belonging to victims” (Lebovics, 2015, n.p.). Unearthed
in Treblinka were “dozens of personal items,” including one that for the lead researcher, Caroline Sturdy
Colls, was “the most memorable: a rose brooch.” Explains Colls, “These items belonging to women that we