The Pain of Knowledge

Holocaust and Genocide Issues in Education

Yair Auron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351322102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Violation of the rights of a human being and indifference in the face of suffering jeopardize the very existence of human society. The Holocaust is the most extreme example of such violations, and the greatest moral failure mankind has experienced. Confronting the Holocaust, as well as genocide, may contribute to understanding the importance of humanistic and democratic values, and help construct tools for making moral judgments. That is why courses on the study of genocide and the Holocaust have become part of the curricula of educational institutions in the United States and elsewhere. This book asks how the moral messages of the Holocaust and genocide can best be transmitted. The Pain of Knowledge deals not with historical events, but with possible ways of learning about these events and their significance. It attempts to examine and deal critically with some of the profound dilemmas at the core of Holocaust and genocide issues in education. The underlying purpose of this book is to expose the reader to sometimes antithetical, and at other times complementary, views concerning the teaching of these subjects, both in Israel and elsewhere in the world. This book will contribute to the teaching of the Holocaust and genocide, and encourage readers to examine these issues from a broad perspective. Among the subjects dealt with in The Pain of Knowledge are: how societies crystallize their collective memories; historical processes and changes in the teaching of the Holocaust in Israel during different periods of time; commemoration of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day; journeys of Israeli youth to sites connected with the Holocaust in Poland; attitudes of Israeli adolescents toward the Holocaust; attitudes of Israeli Arabs toward the Holocaust; general world attitudes toward the Holocaust; teaching of the Holocaust throughout the world; and teaching of genocide in Israel and elsewhere. Yair Auron is senior lecturer at The Open University of Israel and the Kibbutzim College of Education. He is the author of numerous articles and books on genocide and on contemporary Judaism, including Jewish-Israeli Identity and We Are All German Jews: Jewish Radicals in France During the Sixties and Seventies.

1

On the Construction of Memory

In the preface of his book The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish writer who was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, describes how the S.S. soldiers would amuse themselves by cynically taunting the camp inmates, telling them that even if any of them survived their cruelties and abasement no one would believe them if they recounted what had happened in the camps. He adds that almost all of the survivors described, orally or in writing, a constantly recurring dream they had during their internment. Although the details varied from one survivor to another, the essence was identical: They are returning to their homes, and with fervor and relief they tell a person dear to them about the suffering they had endured, but no one will believe them; and not only that—no one will even listen. In the dream’s most characteristic, and most typical and cruel version, Levi writes, the interlocutor simply turns around and silently walks away.¹

Among other things, Levi’s description illustrates the significance and importance of the collective memory for the individual and the way it is created, as well as the power with which it can reflect the historical truth (if such a thing is possible at all) or deny it. In the first chapter of the same book, entitled “The Memory of the Offense,” Levi discusses the deceptive character of human memory in general:

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent, and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.²

In terms of the ability of memory to distort (willfully or unintentionally), there are few differences between personal and collective memory. However, while a personal memory may mislead one individual and his surroundings, the collective memory may lead astray entire societies, states, and cultures—and in extreme cases it may do this in a particular, and sometimes harmful, direction. There are situations in which “leading astray” does not literally mean just that but, rather, the reconfiguration of a narrative on the basis of collective associations. Thus, for example, in the collective memory of Israeli society an almost automatic link has been formed between the memory of the national rebirth and the memory of the Holocaust.

Another example, one of many, is Yehuda Amichai’s poem “And Who Will Remember the Rememberers?” four of whose stanzas are presented here to illustrate this point.³ The poet, reflecting on the memory of Israel’s War of Independence, intentionally brings in the memory of the Holocaust, including “Seeking roots in the Warsaw cemetery.” (Amichai also asks questions about the essence of the nation’s “rebirth” and about what it has left in our collective memory).⁴

2

How does a monument come into being? A car goes up in a red blaze at Sha’ar HaGay. A car burnt black. The skeleton of a car.

And next to it, the skeleton of some other car, charred in a traffic accident on some other road. The skeletons are painted with anti-rust paint, red like the red of that flame. Near one skeleton, a wreath of flowers, now dry. From dry flowers you make a memorial wreath, and from dry bones, a vision of resurrected bones.

And somewhere else, far away, hidden among the bushes, a cracked marble plaque with names on it. An oleander branch, like a shock of hair on a beloved face, hides most of them.

But once a year the branch is cut back and the names are read, while up above, a flag at half-mast waves as cheerfully, as a flag at the top of the flagpole, light and easy, happy with its colors and breezes.

And who will remember the rememberers?

7

And who will remember? And what do you do to preserve memory?

How do you preserve anything in this world?

You preserve it with salt and with sugar, high heat and deep freeze, vacuum sealers, dehydrators, mummifiers.

But the best way to preserve memory is to conserve it inside forgetting so not even a single act of remembering will seep in and disturb memory’s eternal rest.

8

Seeking roots in the Warsaw cemetery.

Here it is the roots that are seeking. They burst from the ground, overturn gravestones, and clasp the broken fragments in search of names and dates, in search of what was and will never be again.

The roots are seeking their trees that were burned to the ground.

9

Forgotten, remembered, forgotten

Open, closed, open.

The theoretical literature dealing with collective memory attempts to explain the problematic connections between “memory” and “history.” The question of what societies—and among them national societies—remember, and how they transmit this memory to later generations, became a research topic in the second decade of the twentieth century. The work of the French scholar Maurice Halbwachs, still considered an important breakthrough in the study of collective memory, contributed greatly in this research. Halbwachs’s basic postulation was that each group develops a picture of its past by highlighting its unique identity in comparison with that of other groups. These reconstituted images of its past provide the group with evidence about its origin and development, thus allowing it to identify itself throughout history. The collective memory, since it is bound together with the tendentious transmission of information from generation to generation, is broader than an individual’s autobiographical memory, and it is meant to prevent the “forgetting,” the “selective amnesia,” that is always present alongside memory.

Halbwachs ascribed the utmost importance to the social context of the collective memory, as well as to the role of forgetting, and to the role of both in history. He asserted that memory and history were antithetical, and to a great extent even inimical.⁵ Memory, he claimed, is a product of the social dynamic and changes constantly in accord with society’s challenges; history is a scientific product unaffected (or supposedly unaffected) by current social and political pressures. Hence, forgetting can be a product of the collective memory, at times even deliberately so, but not of history. Halbwachs further asserts that the vast amount of documentation and historical research in our present era precludes modern societies from formulating collective memories for themselves.

Pierre Nora bases his assertions on Halbwachs’s claims but disagrees with him on some points. In Nora’s view, memory is a living entity maintained by an existing group of people:

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.... Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it....⁶

According to Nora, “At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory.”⁷ Moreover, the development of historiographical consciousness, that is, the history or the philosophy of history, exposes history’s ability to affect memory. In this way history efficiently improves the ways in which it cuts itself away from memory and “reconstitutes” itself.

It is on the background of this distinction that Nora coined the term “les lieux de mémoire”—”the sites of memory”—those that are subordinate to both remembrance and history. What regulates the sites of memory is the tension between memory and history, each of which is trying to break through the boundary of the other. According to Nora, this is especially true for France, where modern historiography tends to explode myths and to shake up the foundations of issues that have long been anchored in tradition (and does so with considerable hubris, again according to Nora).

Nora claims that, in effect, everything that today is termed memory is actually history. What Nora is referring to is not “true memory,” which is primary and subjective, but “memory transformed by its passage through history . . . voluntary and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous; psychological, individual and subjective; but never social, collective or all encompassing.”⁸

In her book Recovered Roots, the American-Israeli researcher Yael Zerubavel reviews various different theories that deal with collective memory.⁹ Zerubavel, too, relates to Halbwachs’s postulation of an antithesis between collective memory and historical memory, although she doesn’t completely accept it. She asserts that collective memory and historical memory do not work on separate and disconnected planes but are mutually affected by the ongoing and constantly changing conditions of the tension between them. Thus, in her opinion, there is no basis for Halbwachs’s claim that modern societies have stopped creating collective memories. In her discussion of the collective memory of Israeli society, Zerubavel analyzes, among others, Josephus’s account of the fall of Masada and the Holocaust, events considered symbolic historical milestones that, after being selectively shaped into historical stories, have become inseparable components of the Israeli-Jewish collective memory.

* * *

In view of all the above, it is obvious that the issues inherent in the connection between collective memory and history have important implications for the teaching of the Holocaust and genocide. When we discuss these topics within an educational framework we therefore have to ask ourselves several important questions: To what extent is our teaching dependent on collective memory and to what extent on history? Are we sufficiently aware of the educational significance of the interaction between the two? Are we aware of the complexity of this interaction? Is Pierre Nora’s definition of the “sites of memory” as the interplay between memory and history-the reciprocal give-and-take that allows them to define one another-applicable and meaningful for the teaching of these subjects? And for the teaching of the Holocaust in Israel in particular? Is there sufficient room in the Israeli-Jewish collective memory and in Israeli-Jewish history for the “other” victims of the Holocaust? And is it not, in any case, the right thing to do to include them, too, within the framework of the teaching of the Holocaust in Israel?

We also cannot ignore some particularly difficult and often very complex questions that arise when teaching about the Holocaust within the context of the collective memory: What is the place in the collective memory of Jewish speculators and profiteers who also lived in the ghettos? Of members of the Judenraat who differentiated between suffering and suffering and between blood and blood? Of those Jewish policemen in the ghettos who helped the Germans carry out the destruction? Of some of the kapos and block leaders who helped to enforce the rule of terror in the camps? And of all of these, what do we want our children to remember, and what do we want them to forget? Put differently, what do we prefer to keep in the collective memory and what do we choose to erase from it?

Notes

1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal) (New York: Vintage International/Random House, 1989), p. 12.

2. Ibid., p. 23.

3. Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open: Poems (translated from the Hebrew by Chana Block and Chana Kronfeld) (New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt, 2000).

4. Ibid., pp. 170–171, Stanzas 2, 7, 8, 9.

5. Quoted in Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” (“The Sites of Memory”), Representations, 26, Special Iss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. On the Construction of Memory
• 2. Philosophical Reflections on the Holocaust
• 3. Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust in Israel
• 4. The Teaching of the Holocaust in Israel: Historical Processes
• 5. On Teaching the Holocaust: Didactic Aspects
• 6. Learning Programs in Israel
• 7. Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day
• 8. Journeys of Youth to Poland
• 9. About the Attitudes of Israeli Adolescents towards the Holocaust
• 10. About the Attitudes of Israeli Arabs towards the Holocaust
• 11. To Remember or to Forget?
• 12. On the Teaching of the Holocaust Around the World
• 13. On the Teaching of Genocide
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index