"Learning About the Holocaust is More Important Than Ever"

At the beginning of May, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) held our 36th Annual Symposium on the Holocaust. Over two days, the Symposium brought nearly 1000 senior secondary students from across British Columbia to UBC to hear from historians, experts, and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust.

The event went amazingly well and I was so proud to have had a hand in helping to organize and emcee an event which, over the years, has had a proven impact on the students who attend (the VHEC's own Nina Krieger and Kazuko Kusumoto both attended the event as students).

I could write an entire blog post about the event itself, but Basya Laye of the Jewish Independent has already written a fantastic article which you can find here.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected aspects of this year's Symposium was finding out that afterwards a number of students were using Twitter to tell their social networks about what they had experienced and how the day had impacted them. It was great to see this sort of spontaneous, unsolicited feedback about the program. In many ways, it was much more candid and real than the feedback that they had given us on our carefully created evaluation forms. These tweets also had the added bonus of creating excitement among the VHEC staff (the majority of whom were largely unfamiliar with Twitter or didn't see the appeal) for using this type of social media more actively to promote our organization and the work that we do here.

Echoes & Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust (Shafran Teacher's Conference)

As part of my new job at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre I am responsible for planning, organizing and promoting many of the Centre's educational events, including the upcoming Shafran Teacher's Conference (February 11, 2011).

Although a great deal of planning and organization for the conference was already underway when I joined the team at the VHEC (thank you, Nina Krieger!), one of the ways that I have been able to contribute so far was in promoting the event online. Last week I approached Joel Ralph at Canada's History Magazine about the event and he was kind enough to post our conference flyer on his website and put it in the magazine's newsletter which is distributed to teachers and interested historians across Canada. I was also able to write a blog post for ActiveHistory.ca about the event, combining the conference's existing publicity materials with my own experiences as a teacher (in order to better fit the style of writing for that publication).

To be honest, I'm not sure that promoting the Shafran Teacher's Conference in either of these publications will have an impact on actual conference registration numbers. After all, the VHEC is promoting this event to a very select group of people: teachers in British Columbia (specifically those in Vancouver and surrounding areas) with an interest in Holocaust Education. The audiences for both Canada's History Magazine and ActiveHistory.ca, on the other hand, are nationwide and not entirely made up of educators. Thus, a large number of people who read the announcement for the conference will either a) not find it applicable to them or b) find it applicable but be unable to attend due to travel and/or time constraints.

Despite all that, I don't think that my time was wasted in choosing to publicize the event in this way. Now, two national audiences with readership in the thousands, have had some exposure to the VHEC's name and a little taste of the type of programming that we do. Even if this specific event wasn't up their alley, perhaps future ones will be. Or, maybe the next time they need something Holocaust-related, they'll think to approach the VHEC for referrals, resources or information. You just never know. :)

Searching for Sophie Scholl Online is Like Trying to Find the Smallest Kid in a Game of Hide-and-Go-Seek

For the purpose of our latest Digital History assignment, our class has been asked to write a brief introductory guide to some of the sources and tools that are available online about any subject of our choosing. The only stipulations are that the topic must be something we are personally passionate about, has a historical dimension and can be boiled down to just a handful of essential websites or methods of information trapping.

In honour of this year’s Holocaust Education Week theme of defiance and resistance, I decided to focus my Digital History assignment along the same lines. I understand, however, that there’s no possible way to concisely treat the topic of defiance and resistance without doing an injustice to the millions of people affected by the Holocaust and their tens of millions of acts of resistance, both large and small. Instead, I decided to narrow my focus to Sophie Scholl’s participation in the White Rose, a non-violent organization made up of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor, Kurt Huber. In brief, Sophie and her brother, Hans, were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets on university property. They, along with their friend, Christoph, were then arrested, tried for treason, found guilty and executed within a week. Soon after, most other members of the student group were arrested, tried and executed. Few survived the war.

Now that we have the basics, it’s time for the research:

Like any good student, I know that I’m not supposed to admit to using Wikipedia as my “go-to” source for quick introductory searches. But I do. Sue me. As long as the person using Wikipedia is aware of its downfalls and refrains from sourcing it (just as you would any other encyclopaedia), I think that it is a pretty good starting point, if for nothing else than for mining the footnotes and helping to develop stronger research questions. With that in mind, you may want to check out the Wikipedia pages for Sophie Scholl and/or The White Rose.

If this were any other research topic I would likely head from Wikipedia to Google to continue my search. However, since this particular search concerns personalities and organizations concerned with the Holocaust, I prefer to make the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website my next visit. Although I was disappointed in the lack of biographical information that the USHMM provided, I was pleased to see that they had included a list of print resources to consult at a later time, links to FAQs about the group, a short memoir by one of the surviving members (which I will get to in just a moment) and educational resources about resistance during the Holocaust. The general affect of the USHMM site is to give a reader an inclination as to how Sophie and the other members of the White Rose fit into the narrative of the Second World War as a whole.

The aforementioned memoir by one of the few surviving members of the group, Dr. George J. Wittenstein, is reached via The History Place website (specifically its Points of View section). This source offers the reader a unique opportunity to see the effect that time has had on the recollections of someone who was in the thick of things and somehow managed to escape with their life. In his memoir Wittenstein introduces many of the key members of the White Rose, discusses the leaflets written by Hans Scholl, Alex Schmorell and Kurt Huber, the trials and the aftermath. He also includes selections from the leaflets, as well as partial trial transcripts from their sentencings.

The Shoah Education Project is also a helpful site when looking for unique information on the White Rose that I haven’t found anywhere else on the web. That is, Dr. Elizabeth Kirkley Best provides a list of the members of the White Rose and what became of them. It is interesting to see from the chart the different ways that men and women were charged for their involvement in the same organization.

The last website that I would like to suggest anyone interested in Sophie Scholl or the White Rose organization look up is the one run by The Holocaust Research Project. This website has a number of pages devoted to Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, but its biggest triumph is that it has translations for all six leaflets in their archives. That one’s a gem.

In addition to my usual search techniques, I thought I would try a few different avenues this time around and see if any of them were effective for the purposes of this assignment. Turns out, they’re largely not.

The first thing I tried was imputing my search terms into Google Search and then attempting to use the Google Wonder Wheel to see what, if any, different search results it would lead me to. I use the word “attempt” because as soon as I would click on the Wonder Wheel option, Google would bounce me out of the specialty search and back onto their main page. Strike one.

Next I tried image searching via Flickr (instead of using my old, reliable Google Image Search). and found that this worked with mediocre results – I found some images, but it was inefficient, largely disorganized and the results were underwhelming in terms of numbers. In short, my results using Google Image Search were both faster and better. Strike two.

Out of sheer curiosity, I then tried Google Timelines for Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and the White Rose to see if I could unearth any new information. All of the timelines were sparse and largely unhelpful. Strike Two... and a half.

I also thought it might be neat to search for “Sophie Scholl” in different blog search engines, so I put the term into Google Blogs and into IceRocket’s blog section. I got very different hits on both search engines, but neither one was very satisfactory. With IceRocket I was bombarded with foreign language web pages. After I waded through the majority of those and through the Google Blogs results, I discover that the majority of people that are blogging about Sophie Scholl are doing so in response to the movie that was released in 2007 entitled Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Strike three.

I suppose I can admit now that this movie was actually my introduction to Sophie Scholl. After watching the movie I wanted to know more about this girl who had acted so courageously in the face of such strong opposition and such dire consequences. But then, just as now, it was extremely difficult to find a substantial amount of information on this small group of German students and their most famous female member.

Additional sources you may be interested in:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/rose.html

http://roses-at-noon.blogspot.com/

http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/holocaust/articles/sophie-scholl-white-rose.2786.htm

[Note: The picture seen above is of one of the White Rose monuments in Munich, Germany. This one is located in front of the Bavarian Government building and includes the text one one of the group's anti-war leaflets. The photo was taken in May 2007].

Tags: Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, WWII, Holocaust

Remembering the Shoah

Yesterday marked the beginning of the 29th Annual Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. From November 1st until November 11th, members of the Holocaust Centre of Toronto and affiliated Jewish organizations are hosting over 170 programs designed to honour the memory of those murdered in the Holocaust and to celebrate the survival of those who were not. The lectures, operas, films and exhibitions offer a perfect opportunity for the Jewish community to educate and promote understanding and remembrance of this tragic event among Jewish and non-Jewish community members alike.

While I think that the majority of the programming is worthwhile attending, I find myself especially drawn to the “My Personal Testimony” segments that run several times a day at different locations around the city. Each testimonial features a survivor of the Holocaust recounting their personal experiences from the war. The stories cover a range of experiences, from living in hiding, to fighting with the partisans in the forest, to struggling to survive in ghettos and concentration camps, during deportations and on death marches. They cover liberation, the aftermath and the decisions made by these survivors to immigrate to Canada.

I think that this is part of the magic of oral history; each testimonial is unique, just as each survivor is unique, and yet their accounts combine together to create a single narrative with common elements, themes and outcomes. During Holocaust Education Week dozens of people will come together to say, “This is who I am. This is what I did. This is what was done to me. This is how I survived. This is how I triumphed.” But what they will come away with is a communal narrative that says, “This is who we are. This is what we did. This is what was done to us. This is how we survived. This is how we triumphed.”

I believe that the survivors of the Holocaust, just as veterans of a war, have a responsibility to recount their stories for the generations that come after them. Their testimony is their opportunity to have a voice, to be understood, to understand. In return, we, as their audience, have the privilege of bearing witness to their stories, gaining insight from them and taking the next step to preserving their memory.

Virtual(ly) Auschwitz

Two years ago as a student teacher I took my tenth grade Canadian history class on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We started at the camp’s entrance – one teacher and twenty-eight students staring at a gate with its sly promise that “Work Will Make You Free.” From there we moved into the camp and spent the next hour exploring one of the most horrific examples of man’s inhumanity to man. And, while World War II’s worst extermination camp is located on a completely different continent, my students and I made the trip without ever leaving our school’s computer lab; the tour I took them on was a virtual one.

Although my students enjoyed the lesson and seemed to learn a lot from it, using virtual tours as a method of communicating history to the public is not one without its flaws. As amazing as virtual tours are in their ability to capture the physical environment of a historical site such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, I still find that they are at their most effective when combined with other forms of learning. For instance, in my case the majority of my students had participated in a Jewish Symposium as part of the Niagara District School Board’s Holocaust Education Week efforts before taking the virtual tour of Auschwitz. At the symposium students were treated to a lecture on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust given by a guest speaker from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they watched a film entitled Paper Clips (2004) and spent the afternoon listening to survivor testimonies. Because of their previous experience at the symposium, students were able to make connections during the virtual tour between what they were seeing and reading on their computer screen and what Bill had told them of his time in Dachau. Without that personal testimonial to draw from, however, the major downfall of virtual tours becomes readily apparent; they often lack the ability to make the sort of impact that really resonates with learners.

We should also be careful to remember that not all virtual tours are created equally. These days, most webmasters have the ability to slap a bunch of photographs together, walk a visitor through them in a particular order and call it a ‘tour’. We’ve all seen it done. In contrast, I’ve found the virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau to be one of the better ones that I’ve taken of a historical site. The site’s creators at Remember.Org have thoughtfully supplemented the 360 degree tour of the physical camp grounds with art work from survivors and links to relevant photographs and information on third party websites. This allows visitors to the site to complete the tour at their own pace, choosing for themselves which aspects of camp life strike a cord and warrant further examination.

It's clear that virtual tours can never replace the experience of actually visiting a historical site like Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, they do provide a unique way for people bound by geographic, monetary or time constraints to interact with history in a modern, meaningful way.

To: Russia. With Love, the American Historical Association

Surprise, surprise! Censorship has once again reared its ugly head in Russia. Fortunately, this time the international historical community isn’t taking it lying down.

In May, the president of the Russian Federation, Dmitrii Medvedev, announced the creation of the Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia, a 28 member panel charged with investigating historical works and debate and determining whether or not they are harmful to the country’s reputation. Works found to be “unfavorable” to Russia are to be suppressed and those responsible for them may face criminal charges or fines. No specifics were given as to exactly what sort of “falsifications” the commission would be looking into.

Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of the commission is its makeup – of the 28 members, only 3 are historians (one archivist and 2 researchers). That means that the other 25 people responsible for categorizing historical works as “harmful” or “unfavorable” to Russia are bureaucrats and politicians. I’m sure that I’m not alone in questioning what qualifications those men and women who have been appointed by the government have to judge the merit of historical debates and pass judgement on those that take part in them.

Further, anyone who feels strongly about the freedoms of speech, thought and expression will likely take issue with this blatant attempt at censorship. In fact, historians both in Russia and abroad were quick to express their discontent with the new initiative. In the United States, Arnita Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association (AHA), has responded to the commission’s creation by writing an open letter to President Medvedev. In the letter (a link to which can be found here), she implores the president to reconsider the commission and support free and open debate amongst the members of the historical community. She argues (quite eloquently, I think) that:

"Any limitation on freedom of research or expression, however well intentioned, violates a fundamental principal of scholarship: that the researcher must be able to investigate any aspect of the past and to report without fear what the evidence reveals."

The AHA’s position on Medvedev’s commission is clear – it impedes intellectual freedom, seeks to influence the course of historical research and fosters an environment in which dissent, and therefore debate, are unwelcome. Since all of these conditions are intolerable, the commission must be disbanded.

Personally, I find the most interesting facet of the AHA’s argument against the commission to be one that I had not previously perceived as a connected issue – they have linked their stance on the commission with their stance on criminalizing Holocaust denial. While the AHA vehemently opposes the work of Holocaust deniers (as do I, just for the record), they do support their right to conduct research and enter into scholarly debate on the topic without fear of legal repercussions.

This is a fascinating argument. I have never questioned the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals have consistently found against Holocaust deniers. In fact, in the past these decisions have made me proud to be a citizen in a country that has taken a stand against what I see to be both ludicrous and hateful claims. However, the more that I consider it, the more I believe that the AHA might have it right. If we, in Canada, make certain interpretations of historical evidence related to the Holocaust illegal, how soon before we make similar restrictions against other topics? How soon before we move from criminalizing only truly hateful claims to the point where we start restricting historical debate on topics that are only mildly distasteful or tarnishing to Canada's reputation? Where do you draw the line? And, perhaps more to the AHA's point -- who should draw that line?

I worry about the work that this commission will do. It seems to me that it’s a pretty slippery slope from attempting to suppress the out-and-out fiction to calling something fiction so that you can get away with suppressing it.