Oral evidence: Holocaust education, HC 480Tuesday 1 December 2015
Oral evidence, 1 December 2015.
Witnesses
Andy Lawrence, History Teacher, Hampton School, Sarah O’Hanlon, Holocaust Educational Trust Ambassador, Gertrude Silman, Honorary Life President, Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association, and Professor Michael Rosen, Professor of Children’s Literature, Goldsmith University of London, gave evidence.
Chair
Welcome to our second session. We have only half an hour for this session so we must have pithy questions. The two Lucys have been briefed just a moment ago on that, and Ian knows the importance of pithiness as well. But that applies to the answers too, because we do want to get to the core of these issues. I am going to kick off. In your own experiences have you seen examples of Holocaust education promoting tolerance? Gertrude?
Mrs Silman
I think it is a very difficult one to answer because I go into classrooms and speak. Like from the previous session, we do get feedback and the feedback comes in the form of letters and things, and we think that we are making quite a—
Professor Rosen
Exactly as we heard earlier. It is very difficult to say it promotes tolerance as such. I can think of two examples—one when I had to confront Holocaust denial in a sixth form college. Denial is a very particular form of ongoing persecution, so it is not so much a matter of tolerance but how you deal with ongoing anti-Semitism and racism. I confronted it directly with my personal testimony of my own family. The other example I am thinking of is with my daughter doing Key Stage 3 History and the way in which the Holocaust was put in the context of other genocides, which I thought was remarkable; absolutely a remarkable piece of history. Talking to her about her experiences, I can’t say it promoted tolerance. It certainly promoted understanding and a world outlook.
Sarah O’Hanlon
When I have done a lot of lessons with students—because I am an ambassador and I did the HET project—we have tried to look at the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. We have connected it with things like racism and anti-Semitism, in this country. In that way it is promoting tolerance because the students did not quite realise that it only takes several steps to almost get to that point and you are stopping these steps in their tracks. If you look at these steps and realise that maybe separating somebody, identifying them as being separate from you, that is intolerance; trying to pick up on that and realising that is a major issue and students might do this and not realise they are doing it or not realise the impact that it can ultimately have if it is a massive group doing it.
Andy Lawrence
I am a teacher. I hope that all my lessons implicitly promote tolerance but it is not an explicit aim. I don’t think we should underestimate our young people. I think they come in to the room with a great deal of a sense of tolerance and so on. I think the implicit aim of lessons should be to promote tolerance but explicitly, no.
Chair
Michael, you have said there is, “a fruitful discussion to be had” in the context of Holocaust education to today’s challenges of racist groups, potential future genocides and the refugee issue. How should teachers bring those modern-day concepts into connection with the Holocaust?
Professor Rosen
For me the vital moment—and Sir Eric touched on it—is the transition from what was a democratic society with many of the institutions that are identical to our own. If we look at the nature of the Weimar Republic in 1920s, and how the transformation took place prior to acts of persecution and genocide of the Jews, there is a set of acts of legislation brought in by the Nazis as they gained power; the so-called Reichstag Decree and the enabling Act, which as it happens my daughter is learning about this week. These are the crucial transformations of a democratic state into a fascist state that enabled the Holocaust to happen. The point is that we can point at persecutions throughout history and that are going on now. The difference between random persecutions—frightful and awful though they are—and the Holocaust is that there is a state apparatus that enabled it to happen. Therefore, the transformation is crucial and it seems to me that kind of discussion is vital. Then we can look at regimes around the world and ask, if we are looking at a regime, is in transition? Is it doing the same thing? Is it different? How is it different? That seems to me a very important discussion to have. When we look at the refugee crisis at the moment, and we look at the way in which distinctions are being made between refugees and migrants and economic migrants, different labels being put on them, how can we turn them back? I find myself instantly reminded of the distinctions made with my own relatives where, because they were foreign-born Jews in France, they were put on a particular list that enabled them to be deported, ultimately, to Auschwitz and to die and the so-called native-born Jews in France were not. Those kinds of distinctions, and how they were made through the instruments of the State, not random beatings up in back streets, those are the kinds of things that we should draw attention to.
Chair
Thank you very much, Michael. That was a good answer; long but good.
Ian Austin
I would like to ask you a couple of questions about how well the Holocaust is taught in schools. Andy, you obviously do more on this than most teachers and your school does more on it than most schools. The pupils who come to your school for your commemoration events, how less well-informed are they about the Holocaust than your pupils? What is the outcome of this? At the end of their time at school, what is the difference that you have made? What are your pupils going away with that pupils in other schools haven’t got?
Andy Lawrence
To set the context, every year we have Holocaust Memorial Day events. Last year we had 350 people from our community; 10 schools from our borough and 100 students. In a way it is a self-selecting audience because the teachers who are interested brought their kids along; teachers that were not interested weren’t. A lot of those teachers who came along had been on training courses run by UCL and HET and so on, and so I think those students who came along were well informed. Paul Salmons from UCL came and ran a session for us before the survivors spoke and the students were engaged, they were knowledgeable, they were brilliant. One thing that I point to that perhaps students from my school go away with is a sense of being an activist. Perhaps one thing they go away with is, yes, a sense of wanting to enhance tolerance and to be worried about the refugee crisis and bullying and so on, but they do not lose sight of the ‘never-again’ question, which I think we are in danger of losing sight of. They go away with a sense of, “We’ve got to do something about this” and so that is why they produced the only textbook for schools on the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. That is their sense of, “We would need to do something”. That is the key thing they go away with.
Ian Austin
Gertrude, the Survivors’ Friendship Association raises concerns about the lack of knowledge of the Holocaust among school children. Is that something that you have experienced personally?
Mrs Silman
I feel my experience is certainly different from the other three speakers here. I am a non-professional in that sort of sense. I go into schools and it is very variable. If the teachers have prepared the pupils, it is fine. If they haven’t, it can be a disaster. On the whole, I think the schools we visit, and the universities and other community centres and so on, are on the whole always very receptive of what we give. My attitude to all this is not from the teaching angle but what would I like to see. My feeling is first that the Holocaust is extremely special. As a child refugee, and having lost most of my family, I have a much more personal interest in this. I want the Holocaust to be a special, small unit, which could be generally taught but because it is such a huge subject it cannot be done in schools on their own. I feel where we are missing out, because we now have quite a lot of Holocaust witnesses and films and so on, a great deal of that can be used. I do a lot of speaking to primary school children. If you have the rightly tailored talk—as a pseudo Kindertransport I can tell them about my own experiences—a child of about 10 or 11 as I was then, will identify. Similarly, I can tell them about the camp issues and so on, not in the primary schools but in the next sector, because a lot of my family went through Auschwitz. The other thing I find a little bit hurtful is we hear a great deal about Auschwitz; we never hear anything about Czechoslovakia. We don’t know anything about Slovak uprisings. We don’t know that Slovakia paid per capita to have their people deported into the camps. All those things are totally unknown. You can’t teach everything. This is the problem. The subject is huge. I would like to see a kernel module, if somebody can devise one, for the different key stages, which gave some basic facts but don’t worry about the details. Use your case studies and research the higher up you get. There is a huge amount of research. For example, I am going to Slovakia to the launch of the Sered Holocaust museum on 26 January, just coming up. It has taken them a long time. Britain has had a difficult situation because they were not invaded by the Nazis and, therefore, very few people have a close relationship with many Jewish people. We in the north of England have far fewer Jewish people than you have in London and, therefore, London is a special case. I feel we have a strong case for having a northern centre as well for doing and looking after this education. I am sorry if I haven’t answered the question.
Chair
It is a good answer. Thank you very much, Gertrude. Very important points raised there. Lucy Allan, you are going to talk about the role of survivors, which is fitting following that very interesting point.
Lucy Allan
Yes. I would like to ask questions around the importance of personal testimony. Perhaps moving to you first, Sarah. You organise visits of survivors to schools. What is it that is so impactful about that personal testimony?
Sarah O’Hanlon
Having the person there and being able to ask them questions and them respond automatically to you and speak to a wide audience, has an individual impact on each person and also you get to see the individual impact of what persecution, what hatred, what racism even can lead to. You can see the little stories and, as you were saying about the individual strands of the Holocaust, each person experienced it in a different way, so the more people that you can hear it from the more you are getting educated on it. That is the opportunity where you can go and expand on it or you can research something that might have interested you particularly and find out more about it. It opens up a lot more doors but in a short period of time.
Lucy Allan
Gertrude, what age do you think is an appropriate age for a youngster to be introduced to personal testimony, because it is so powerful?
Mrs Silman
Well, 10 is probably as young as I would go although I must admit I have spoken to children in a group between six and 10, but you have to be very careful how you do it. Each stage is different.
Lucy Allan
Yes. I think that is right. Andy, how do you balance the use of survivor testimony with the wider context? Obviously it has to be put within its context to make it meaningful.
Andy Lawrence
Absolutely. The key point here is that teachers successfully set the context, they set the groundwork, they build the foundation, and then the survivor can come along and build on that. Going back to your point on age, I think the context is everything and I think the survivors are experts, whether they are Rwandan survivors, Bosnians, or survivors from the Holocaust. They are experts at moderating their message to fit. I am in awe of them as teachers I really am. I wish I could teach as well as they do. They moderate the message. You can hear a pin drop. Mala Tribich came to our event of 350 people. She stood up and spoke for 90 minutes and the place was just in awe of her. It was wonderful. Teachers must build the foundation and then the survivors can enhance things incredibly.
Lucy Frazer
Michael, we are going to have fewer and fewer survivors as time goes on. Do you think it is appropriate for children of survivors to take on any role at all?
Professor Rosen
I do, absolutely. I think it is crucial. Children and relatives—I am a great nephew of victims of the Holocaust—have information and documents. We sometimes have physical objects. Our testimony is very personal but at the same time at a distance. Although it may not be exactly as emotional it means we can give it some kind of context about how we got here and why we are alive, so the other element we bring to bear is, “That could have happened to me”. When I look at the history, say of my relatives, I can point at France and say, “If I was living in France at that time and been like that, that would have happened to me. If the Nazis had invaded Britain that could have happened to me”. That is immediately powerful. When you are standing in front of people of any age and you say, “That could have happened to me. I am just Joe Bloggs. I am just somebody walking around, but because I have a label on me that says ‘Jew’ that could have happened to me”. That is a very powerful thing to say. It is nowhere near as vital and as immediate as the survivors and, goodness me, there is nothing more vital than that. We do of course have videos and so on and we will keep those, and oral testimonies that way, but the point is that we relatives have a crucial contribution to make as well and that should go on; indeed.
Lucy Frazer
Gertrude, last year BBC Learning produced a film about your experiences and you have already mentioned the importance of film. Is there anything more that you think could be done as one generation moves on?
Mrs Silman
Once again I have to go out of your question because I think all the modern technology is fantastic. I know that we with the Holocaust group have a lot of material, we have produced a lot of material and we want to go now and bring it out into the open. But my feeling is we are missing out a great deal because I personally feel—and this is a personal opinion—it is such a wide subject that, in fact, it is not just what we teach and the artefacts and how we present it, the fact is it is a much deeper root than that. In my opinion we need to have a proper economy so that people are not in an unemployed state where they are frustrated, because frustration leads to this prejudice and hatred and to me that means we are not getting to the fundamentals. The Holocaust was an absolute example of where things have wrong due to the economy partly. Can you see what I am getting at here? This is what I feel we are missing in all our education discussions. Education has to be done, all this has to be done, but it is a far wider question than that.
Lucy Frazer
Sarah and Andy, what more do you think could be done?
Andy Lawrence
Two points. I think technology will play a part and the work that the UK HMF is doing at the moment will be pushing that. Also, when you said “survivors” I assume you were talking about Holocaust survivors?
Lucy Frazer
Yes.
Andy Lawrence
I think we should not neglect survivors from other genocides because it is perhaps part of the legacy of Holocaust survivors that we should empower the survivors of other genocides too, so I do not think we should neglect that area either.
Sarah O’Hanlon
It is so important to have people from other genocides now especially because there will not be a stock forever of Holocaust survivors. I think it will act as a good transition to looking into other genocides. Maybe if we teach history and we explore it and we question the genocide within history we need to look at other genocides in other aspects, so like in English, in Citizenship. I think that is where we can introduce other genocides into it because when I have done lessons before students have asked, “Why are we learning this because there has not been a genocide since? It is not important. Why are we learning about the organisation of it, the steps to genocide?” and they have no idea and these are students in Year 10. I think that is when we need to introduce it because that is when it becomes relevant and they are interested and engaged then.
Lucy Frazer
Do you think there is a risk, if we do that, that you would dilute the Holocaust element? No?
Andy Lawrence
Very briefly: absolutely not. No one is saying that and I don’t think any right-minded teacher would replace teaching the Holocaust with other genocides. I think the point is—and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence out there—that by teaching both you enhance understanding of the Holocaust.
Mrs Silman
I very strongly feel we have to use the Holocaust as the tool for trying to make things better. We don’t need to have much of a look around us to see what is happening. We have not taught properly; we have not got the message through; we have to link the two. It has to be relevant for today. The Holocaust has happened. It was the most terrible thing—I know from my personal experience—but somehow it has to be linked to what is happening today so that it is relevant to the people in the classroom.
Chair
Andy, you have made those links in your classroom, according to the evidence. How did your pupils react?
Andy Lawrence
They reacted very well. Perhaps to develop that point, I did not reduce the amount of time I taught about the Holocaust. I just did it perhaps in a more comparative kind of way. The findings from our anecdotals—it is nothing like the UCL work, which is brilliant—what it showed is that those pupils who have studied the Holocaust and another genocide, they are more angry about other genocides occurring. They feel that they understand the Holocaust better as a result of comparing it to another genocide and they felt that the Holocaust illuminated other genocides and so on. It was a very positive thing to do.
Chair
Michael, I know you want to say something but I want to ask you something as well because you have said that the Holocaust was a scientifically-engineered attempt to eliminate a people—that is your quote—and you would like to distinguish that from other genocides. How are you going to do that?
Professor Rosen
That is precisely so. It was in that area that I was going to talk. I have been confronted several times when talking about the Holocaust with young people, “Why are you going on about that when there is the slave trade?” or when there are other examples that were given to me. It seems to me that people get quite cross about it and imagine that you are creating a kind of league table of persecution. I say the issue is not the outcome specifically. Obviously the sheer numbers of the attempted genocide of all Jews are frightening and awful, but the key thing is not an issue of the fact that that dead person is more valuable than another or is there some special case at that end of the process. It is the other end. It is about intention, so that is the politics of the Holocaust rather than the matter of its enactment. I have always said that every genocide will have different aspects of how it was brought about and what the intentions were. The intention of the slave trade is different and the persecution of Africans and then later of African Americans, in the British Empire indeed, is a different process from what took place in the Holocaust. This particularly applies to, say, upper-school students and to sixth-formers. You can engage in this and that is why you are making distinctions because this is a political matter of how we created the Holocaust, how Europe created the Holocaust. That is the crucial aspect: that this was intentionally organised, scientific, modern state. It was us. This is the frightening thing about the Holocaust. Germany 1930 is not that different in terms of its institutions from Britain today or many of the other countries. I have made the point before, but that is what is crucial in terms of the intentionalism.
Chair
It is a question of context, though, isn’t it, because the context of the Holocaust was in fact the collapse of civilisation in Europe because of the Nazis and because of the war and the impact of it?
Professor Rosen
I don’t think it was a collapse of civilisation. The Nazi organisation, the Third Reich, was not a collapsed civilisation. It was a very well organised society that satisfied many of its inhabitants. Again, as Sir Eric pointed out, people were rewarded in various ways but also it was very “well” organised. It is not a collapse of civilisation; it is not analogous to say, “When the whole of the organisations of the state have collapsed”; precisely the opposite. By and large the organisation of the state was very good, right the way up until the very end. It is worth remembering that the Nazi state did not collapse until the Russians arrived in Berlin.
Ian Austin
To argue that there is a similarity between Britain today and pre-war Germany ignores some of the historical anti-Semitism in Germany before the war. The long-established historical anti-Semitism in Poland, for example, and in France is completely different.
Professor Rosen
We enjoyed our own historical anti-Semitism as well; let’s not get too hoity-toity about it. The point is Europe had its anti-Semitisms, each one taking different forms in different ways. It is well known, for example, that when testimony came out around Auschwitz the complaint was made by a certain fairly high-up person in the civil service, “Well, the Jews do complain quite a lot, don’t they?” This was a point made, so let’s be quite clear. Let’s not get too superior about it. The point is I was talking about the institutions of the state. I wasn’t saying that somehow or other either Germany or Poland or Britain were better or worse. I wasn’t creating a league table of anti-Semitisms either. The key thing is that the institutions of the states of Europe were very similar at the point at which the Holocaust was enabled.
Ian Austin
Of course it is possible; of course it is possible—
Professor Rosen
We do not know what might have happened if the Nazis had invaded here; whether it would have been any different here from France or Poland or Holland or Denmark.
Ian Austin
I know. But Professor Rosen—
Professor Rosen
We don’t know. Let’s remember Guernsey, shall we?
Ian Austin
Of course we don’t. We don’t know, Professor Rosen, because they didn’t invade here.
Professor Rosen
They did get to Guernsey and all nine Jews who were in Guernsey were deported to Auschwitz.
Ian Austin
The reason, Professor Rosen, why they did not invade Britain is that Britain fought back, on its own, and brought freedom and fought for it: not just our freedom but for freedom—
Professor Rosen
We did not do that on our own and it is wrong to tell the histories that way. We were allied with two world powers, America and the Soviet Union.
Chair
We are straying well off the point here so we will—
Ian Austin
I am sorry, Chair, but it is absolute nonsense to claim there is some similarity because of individual examples of anti-Semitism by individual people in Britain with pre-war Germany or pre-war Poland. It is just nonsense.
Chair
Let’s stop. I am drawing a line under this line of discussion. Sarah, you are an ambassador. How did you get that role? How does it affect you?
Sarah O’Hanlon
I was in my sixth form, lower sixth, and our teacher just applied for us and then told us that we had got a place. After that I wanted to carry on the message and tell people what I have seen and get more people to understand. I always think the most important thing for Holocaust education is to make sure that it does not happen again; for the contemporary impact, what it can have now. That is the lesson that you try to pass on and show what this can lead to. That is the reason that I took part. But I feel there does need to be some kind of reform of how people are selected for that programme. When I went obviously I was very interested and most people were so engaged with it, but I think some people struggled when they went and dealt with it differently and perhaps were not prepared as thoroughly by their teachers, not by the Trust; we got as much as we could booklet-wise and things. I feel the teachers from other schools, maybe, sent students just because it was a lottery; they could send people on the programme and they wanted to make sure it would look good on reports or whatever. Those students were not reacting well. They were walking all over; perhaps laughing and things and not paying any attention. That could have been used somewhere a lot better on other students who had a context to it and could take away everything from it and understand it. That’s what you get with a lack of understanding.
Chair
You feel visiting Auschwitz is very important to young people, the experience and the knowledge they glean from it?
Sarah O’Hanlon
Definitely, because you see it first hand and you can witness it and experience it and you see the humanity. Even the sheer scale of it, I think that gives you some indication of the organisation.
Chair
Andy, you have spoken strongly in favour of the Imperial War Museum and also of the Centre for Holocaust Education. How have they helped you as a teacher?
Andy Lawrence
They have helped me in many ways. The CPD that they have provided—I have just been on a residential week with them—has simply been the best CPD I have ever had as a teacher. They provide support when I am back in the classroom. They provide support in terms of setting a methodological model for how I can deliver the lessons, which would probably be the most impactful lessons I teach in a year. They also provide a model for how it has worked very successfully in other schools, such as down at Royal Wootton Bassett and Thomas Hardye school and Hermitage up in Durham and so on. For every stage they provide a model to deliver successful and impactful lessons in the classroom.
Chair
I want to thank you all very much indeed for contributing to this inquiry and answering our questions—sometimes in great detail and sometimes with a huge amount of emotion and intellectual strength. We will be publishing a report in due course and, of course, we will have the National Holocaust Day in mind when we do that. Thank you all very much indeed. If there is anything else you think we need to know and which we don’t know, or we might not know, let us know. Oral evidence: Holocaust education, HC 480 2