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.