Holocaust Education: Who will tell the story?

Good overview on some of the work the Canadian Holocaust centres are doing on Holocaust eduction given that fewer survivors are available to provide personal testimony:

Eyewitness testimony has played a central role in Holocaust education, says Adara Goldberg, education director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The challenge now is to transition to telling their story without them.

For a recent exhibit called Enemy Aliens about Jewish refugees interned in Canada during the war, a curator recorded internees’ experiences, and those voices were the first ones visitors heard upon entering the exhibit. Three of those interviewed died before the exhibition opened, Goldberg says.

The centre, like others across the country, is consulting with survivors on the best ways to use videotaped testimony. “We don’t want to exploit the voices [of survivors]. We want to make sure there is some pedagogical value in what we do.”…

At Toronto’s Holocaust centre, staff are using the 50,000 testimonies, some of them Canadian, recorded by the U.S-based Shoah Foundation. For the generation of digital natives at home with technology, “that’s an automatic point of access,” Phillips says.

The Toronto centre, aided by a grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, has begun organizing some of the testimonies into short, searchable sections, and presenting workshops to adult immigrants learning English. Few of the newcomers had much knowledge about Jews or the Holocaust, but they could relate to the stories of persecution and starting over in a new land, and understand what the survivors contributed to Canadian society. “For many of the… students, this was very inspirational,” Phillips says.

Who will tell the story? | The Canadian Jewish News.