of its area. The rest of the terrain is to be handed over to the next generation in order to construct a new narrative about the Holocaust. This venture perfectly exemplifies the transposition of cultural memory onto space.
What seems evident in this context is that the smoothness of transmission within cultural memory is immensely affected not only by art,35 but also by education.
Educational Practices vis-à-vis the Holocaust
An overwhelming impression is that the Holocaust has always been associated with memory, as the imperative to remember has invariably been intertwined with all Shoah-related practices. In her superb book, Israel’s Holocaust and the ←20 | 21→Politics of Nationhood, Idith Zertal observes that the Holocaust was inscribed in the Israeli project of remembering not simply as an incomprehensible event, but above all as an embarrassing one. However, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which Zertal refers to as “Ben-Gurion’s last great national project,” transformed the awkward silence into a heated debate on the Event, inaugurating a period of conscious critical examination of “the numinous event of the Holocaust” and the attitudes of people, both the perpetrators and the victims.36
The Holocaust ceased to be solely the problem of the survivors and began to capture passionate attention not only in Israel but also all over the world. This development was largely precipitated by the reports from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, published in The New Yorker by Hannah Arendt, who was deeply conflicted with Gershom Scholem and accused by him of not loving Israel and hating Zionism.37 That the Holocaust found itself at the centre of public interest was undoubtedly helped by Arendt’s famed Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), where she developed her seminal, albeit profoundly criticised, concept of the banality of evil.
Given this, it is hardly surprising that the 1960s saw the first attempts to teach about the Holocaust in Israel, which were inspired by Theodor W. Adorno’s radio talk symptomatically entitled “Education after Auschwitz.” In Adorno’s view, the primary responsibility of education was prevention, that is, making sure that the Holocaust would never happen again. His vision of education was emphatically anti-authoritarian, as it excluded pedagogy from any participation in building a totalitarian state. In Adorno’s framework, Holocaust education was essentially underpinned by empathy.38
As a matter of fact, empathy still seems to be axial to education today, even though the methodology of teaching about the Holocaust has already developed mechanisms that promote going beyond the emotional level towards intellectual generalisation and historical knowledge. With these three learning levels in place, didactic practices, which lead from emotions to understanding, to ←21 | 22→embedding events in the historical context, guarantee safe, non-traumatising Holocaust instruction at school.39
Notably, besides the obvious task of teaching about the event, Holocaust education today has other responsibilities ascribed to it. The more remote the historical period of the Holocaust grows, the more frequently Holocaust education gets inscribed in discourses which are only tangentially related to its original pedagogical purposes. Bogusław Śliwerski contends that postmodern pedagogy dispenses with the traditional question “By what methods and for what aims must we educate today?” and supplants it with a new one: “What social function does education still perform today?”40
Consequently, contemporary Holocaust education does not stop at fostering empathy or providing knowledge about the past, but is instead incorporated into the modern project, which is fundamentally informed by the concepts of intercultural and/or postcolonial education. The former, which makes Holocaust education part of efforts aimed at educating society to be prepared for living in the realities of cultural diversity, is based on intercultural learning in contact with the Other. The latter, while safeguarding the memory of the Holocaust, also evokes other narratives which call for inclusion within cultural memory. Such a model of education promotes flexible thinking and the authentic and profound experience of encounter with the Other. Crucially, a shift in the educational approach to the Holocaust entails adopting a multidirectional model of memory, one inclusive of and legitimising the multiplicity of narratives without promoting any of them to be a dominant one.
In the model of education derived from Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy, “encounter does not involve asking ‘who am I?’ or ‘who are you?’; instead, encounter takes place when we are faced with ‘where are you?’ and when responding ‘I’m here’ we engage in a relationship with the Other.”41 Such a ←22 | 23→relationship demands that we constantly negotiate the positions from which we address each other. This seems to be a fundamental task of education because without it our contact with the past will inevitably be limited to repeating the same gestures all over again.
To better grasp this, we can usefully draw on the insights of Ernst van Alphen, who is apprehensive of repetition as, in his view, it fosters acting out the Holocaust instead of working through it, since the hunt for the most archival, i.e. allegedly the purest representation (e.g. a list or a chart), can mutate into a replication of the perpetrators’ practices, whereas the goal of education is not to multiply repetitions, but to make change through conscious reiteration.42 Importantly, Van Alphen recommends a limited trust in knowledge about the Holocaust. His teaching experience suggests that students are tired of what could be called the etiquette of Holocaust education, which dictates the rules and norms of conduct. They want to experience the memory of the Holocaust in different ways, first and foremost through emotions. Advocating the reinstatement of affects in Holocaust education may imply that there is a surfeit of facts and data, an overdosing which paralyses action, breeds stagnation, induces apathy and turns against memory.
Such learning experiences can result in a refusal to participate in the “theatre” of memory, which is exquisitely shown in We Won’t See Auschwitz by Jérémie Dres (born in 1982).43 With the title sounding like an emphatic statement of counter-memory, Dres’s popular comic book tells a story of a thirty-year-old man who goes with his brother on a trip to Poland to look for his Jewish roots. When travelling across the homeland of their ancestors, the young men deliberately steer clear of Auschwitz, convinced that the truth about the past and simultaneously about their identity cannot be found in the extermination camp museum.
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In Poland, the memory of the Holocaust is shaped in young people chiefly at school. Without examining the role that history lessons play in this process,44 I will focus on the obligatory reading lists for Polish classes. The school canon of texts about the Holocaust has been comprehensively discussed by Sylwia Karolak.45 In her examination of opulent literary and didactic resources, Karolak distinguishes two moments of particular relevance to the presence of writings about the Holocaust in Polish language education. One of them is 1947, when Seweryna Szmaglewska’s Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau) was put on the obligatory reading list for primary schools as the first literary text about the Holocaust. The book had
