Teaching moral courage
Anita Sethi visits The National Holocaust Centre and Museum
It’s a bright winter’s day when I visit the Nottinghamshire countryside outside Newark and walk up through the rose gardens to the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, also known as ‘Beth Shalom’ meaning ‘the House of Peace’.
Even in winter, the formal beauty and pathos of the gardens stops me in my tracks. Phil Lyons, the Chief Executive, tells me there are a thousand white rose bushes planted in memory of those murdered in the Holocaust.
“We’re recognising and acknowledging what was lost,” he says. “If you look at the plaque on any rose it will have the name of an individual on it or of a community.”
Near the entrance to the gardens is a large pile of stones. “The Middle Eastern tradition is to place a stone at a burial to remember one person,” he explains. “So we ask people to take a stone from the trough and do that. We try to get kids to understand that this is about the human condition; this is about individuals, this is about you and me. It’s a universal story.”
The Museum was gifted by a Nottinghamshire family after its sons visited the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, and thought that there should be a memorial centre in England that would educate people about the Holocaust.
So their family house became a memorial, museum and educational resource, that serves both primary and secondary aged schoolchildren. Of its 25,000 annual visitors approximately 20,000 come as school parties.
"Holocaust education has to be age-appropriate, and challenging without being traumatic. You can’t learn as well if you’re traumatised. Trauma tends to suspend critical thinking, and one of the things we really want to come out of an experience here is that young people develop the ability to ask questions of history. We don’t give people slick answers, but we will teach them how to ask questions - and that’s transferable to today.”
How is that achieved? “People talk about a spiral curriculum where you start with values - what values went missing during the time of the Nazis for this dreadful thing to happen?”
The centre has a team of specialist educators for both primary and secondary pupils. They start with looking at Kristallnacht and propaganda, and “how these awful lies and fibs about communities builds up a perception that a group of people are less than equal and have to be got rid of.”
Lyons is deeply concerned about the rise of right-wing extremism in modern Britain; this year the centre will be working with schools where pupils are especially vulnerable to extremist thought.
Age-appropriateness is also evident in the museum’s two exhibitions. One tells the story of the Holocaust in a chronological way. It’s designed for secondary school students and adults, unflinchingly depicting the history of anti-Semitism and its effect on one community through photographs and objects, including a pair of tiny felt slippers retrieved from Bergen-Belsen and a concentration camp jacket.
The exhibition encourages the public to reflect on the circumstances in which anti-Semitism arises and how the abnegation of social and personal responsibility enabled the Holocaust – and to think how we can ensure such atrocities do not happen again.
Lyons stresses the importance of showing that “there were the perpetrators, the victims and survivors, and a massive group in the middle called the bystanders - and that is true of today when it comes to hate crime. The great majority of people in any genocide are bystanders because they don’t do anything.”
The museum lays down a challenge: “We’re trying to develop people into ‘upstanders’, to develop moral courage, that social courage to be able to articulate what should not be acceptable in our world today. That is about shared values, it’s about universal values - what are they? What is it that we can all gather around and support and develop as some sort of code for helping us become better citizens. If you see somebody mistreating a disabled person, would you say anything today? I ask myself every day I come here. There are still genocides going on around us. We need people to look back at history to understand the present.”
The other exhibition is “The Journey” - the only exhibition in Europe that is tailored to teaching primary-aged children about the Holocaust. I joined a group of primary school children aged 9-10 as they experienced this immersive interactive exhibition, which explores the story of children of the Kindertransport. Its central narrative is that of a single child, Leo, a composite character built from real individual memories.
Guided by Nicola, our educator, we walked through a series of recreated 1938 environments including a Berlin street, shop, living room, school room, and finally a train that brings Leo to safety in England. We saw how this child became a refugee. Nicola and the children discussed anti-Semitism and discrimination, and parallels to today’s migrant and refugee crisis. The Journey helps to develop empathy.
The rooms are filled with carefully curated objects from the period. Since it was founded, the museum has built up long-standing relationships with Holocaust survivors, who have bequeathed it both their personal effects and their memories. The survivors are integral to the education offered by the museum: every day of the school year, survivors visit the museum and give talks to schoolchildren. More than 100 survivors have told their stories.
Before experiencing The Journey, the group of children I accompanied listen to a powerful talk by Simon Winston in the Museum’s Memorial Hall. He recounts how his family escaped from a ghetto in Radzivillov, where he was born in 1938, and went into hiding until just before the end of the Second World War.
Simon escaped certain death in a Jewish ghetto in Poland by hiding in local farms. He says, "I remember when my father left me in a field. I was five or six years old. I had to wait for my father to collect me. I was covered by corn. I crouched down and waited and waited, which I'd done before."
"Suddenly I was confronted by a group of Ukrainian soldiers. I was petrified. One of the soldiers said to me 'What is your name?' and I gave him my name, not my real name, a false name, a Ukrainian name. He said 'What are you doing?'"
Luckily, Simon’s father had the ingenuity and foresight to teach his children key phrases in Ukrainian should they need to protect themselves. This enabled Simon to explain that he was playing hide and seek and the soldier believed him. This is only one example of Simon’s father’s ingenuity and creativity in pursuit of survival.
Afterwards, Simon shows me a moving letter sent to him by a schoolchild who saw him talk. “That’s what makes it worthwhile,” he says. “People are prepared to listen. A lot of people don’t know about the Holocaust and that there was a process that caused it. That process is repeating itself today.”
He thinks that if humanity doesn’t learn the lessons of history, it’s quite possible that “we’ll have an authoritarian world and freedom and civil and human rights will be pushed to one side and we’ll lose the possibility of living in a world that’s democratic and diverse and capable of accepting other people’s beliefs, lifestyles, and ethnicity without resorting to discrimination and prejudice. When I came to this country, despite being so free, there was still unchecked racism.”
I also met the survivor Bob Norton who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1932. He shares his history, from being a child aged around seven and watching someone commit suicide to his memories of celebrating the end of the War, combined with the great sadness of finding out what happened to relatives. “We use the Holocaust as a medium to teach children how to be tolerant”, says Bob. “Hopefully they will understand and become more tolerant because there’s no doubting that intolerance is on the increase in Britain and other countries – and if it’s not stopped it will lead to similar situations. That’s why I’m doing it – I can assure you I’d much rather sit in my armchair reading the paper.”
Simon Winston
Simon Winston
Partly as a consequence of its rural location, the museum has developed some breath-taking digital projects to ensure that it can extend its teaching, and that the message of these survivors is never forgotten.
Together with Simon, I watch a demonstration of an extraordinary digital initiative called “The Forever Project” which has created 3D holograms of survivors, built from hundreds of hours of filmed interviews, that can be spoken to and questioned. The consequences are fascinating - educators have discovered that children find it easier to ask a hologram a question than a person.
It is also remarkable to watch one survivor, Simon, ask questions of a hologram of a fellow Holocaust survivor, Steven Frank, who was one of 93 children who survived the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia along with his two brothers.
Steven appears to be sitting in a red leather chair - he is both there and not there. Simon looks at the hologram of Steven and says the words: “Holocaust education…” and Steven responds: “It’s probably one of the most important things that children can learn today. The most important thing about education is to make people human, to make them understand the behaviour and beliefs of others they have never come across, and Holocaust education hopefully will make these children see that they’re not the only ones in this world, that there are others who may do things differently from them. We have to learn to live with different people of different religions.”
“Do you believe in God?” Simon asks the hologram of Steven. “Oh yes, I believe in God. God has helped me in so many ways, right from the first time in Theresienstadt. I saw God then. Several times I’ve seen God and he has helped me and guided me in the life that I’ve had. There is more than one way to Birmingham from London - you have the M1 and M4. There is no one religion that is the answer to all problems or the right way of life. They all have something very valuable to contribute but none of them are completist”.
Simon nods: “Ah, yes, very good Steven.”
I ask Simon if he believes in God. “Yes, now, but at one time I didn’t - I was an atheist. Another time I was an agnostic. But now I think - it’s such a fantastic entity the universe that someone must have created it and there must be a reason for it - we don’t understand who and what the reason is at the moment; I hope that one day we will and that there’s life after death. So, I can’t give up on God, not completely.”
Was there anything that made him stop believing? “I was asking: where was God? Why didn’t God stop the Holocaust? Why did God allow Hitler to be born in the first place? Those are the sort of questions I was asking. I went agnostic. Then I discovered this place and one thing I appreciated about this place more than anything else is that they took on board the Nottingham Hebrew congregation - they befriended the Jewish community. When I became part of this place, I was able to rejoin the community, go to synagogue, pray with them and find some kind of faith that I didn’t have before. So when people ask me now, I say, ‘yes’. There are many ways to get to God. All religions have a purpose.”
The Forever Project is intended to become mobile nationally. Given that many Holocaust survivors are now in their last years of life, it has an added urgency; it shows how important technology is in creating and preserving digital memorials for future generations to learn from, and what a powerful tool it can be to teach empathy.
The centre is also working on a digital version of The Journey, which they hope to launch this year if they can secure the funding. This can be used on a tablet as part of an educational package in schools. The key elements in the physical Journey are also in the virtual Journey: Leo’s story, the ability to engage with survivor testimony and with objects and artifacts.
One difference between the virtual and physical Journey is that the physical Journey is set over 6 weeks in 1938 with an educator describing how Hitler seized power over the preceding years. The virtual Journey is intended to be used by ten and eleven year-olds without an educator present, so it begins in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Each part of the story starts with an animation of what is happening in Leo’s life. Objects important to the virtual Journey include Leo’s diary and objects found within Leo’s room. There is background information about the survivors which the objects belonged to. The museum has Beta tested this with children and is encouraged by how they have engaged on their own.
The museum is the guardian of many tragic, instructive memories. But it is also a place of beauty and inspiration, and hope is a recurring theme amongst these harrowing stories – indeed there is a large Tree of Hope – “a symbol of hope for the future” – on one wall of the centre.
As I left The Journey exhibition, a 95 year-old Holocaust survivor named Iby was just finishing her talk. 60 years ago she had made a promise to another prisoner in Auschwitz: that if she managed to survive she would tell the story of what happened to people in the camp.
Her words to this gathering of school-children resonated: “Under the skin we’re all the same. Each of you can make a difference.”
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