Teaching the Holocaust at UNSW Sydney¹

Jan Láníček

‘The Holocaust must be taught and taught well’, conclude Laura J. Hilton and Avinoam Patt in the introduction to a recent volume on Holocaust education.² Holocaust pedagogy keeps evolving. Scholars and teachers develop new course materials, in-class exercises and assessment tasks to engage emerging generations of students. In an era when students can easily access an enormous volume of resources online—of varying quality—and when the film industry keeps producing Holocaust blockbusters in large numbers, educators need to be selective in their decisions about the material they use in the classrooms. There is a sense of a public ownership of the Holocaust as the genocide and the ultimate reminder of the human capacity to commit evil acts, but this omnipresence also means that public ‘knowledge’ of particular aspects of the Holocaust is often based on a simplified reading of history. Rising populism and anti-Semitism worldwide, problematic memory politics in Europe (e.g. in Poland) and the fast-approaching post-witness era all carry additional challenges.

Yet, we have reason to be optimistic. Student interest in Holocaust courses remains high, and the Australian federal and state governments support Holocaust education. A few years ago, a new Holocaust museum opened in Adelaide, South Australia, and there are progressing plans to open Holocaust museums in Brisbane and Perth, the capitals of Queensland and Western Australia.

Holocaust and Holocaust-related courses are offered at several institutions of higher education in Australia. The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, offers such courses at all levels of our undergraduate program. There is a long tradition of Holocaust education at UNSW, where I work as an associate professor of history.³ We currently have a level-two unit that is entirely devoted to a comprehensive history of the Holocaust, which I discuss more in detail below. Holocaust-related topics are also included in the general modern history survey at level one (‘History of the Present’), in level 2 courses in modern European history (‘Europe’s Age of Catastrophe’) and, in particular, in level-three courses on Nazi Germany, ‘Confronting the Past in Contemporary Europe’, and ‘Documentary History and Film’.⁴ UNSW Sydney does not currently offer any courses that teach the Holocaust in a comparative perspective with other cases of genocides, though some of the history units introduce students to various cases of gross human rights violations, such as the history of the Armenian genocide, the Soviet Holodomor, the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, wars in the former Yugoslavia and so on.

I have been teaching Holocaust-related courses at UNSW Sydney since my appointment in 2012. The core unit I designed and still convene is a level-two course that introduces students to the complex history of the Nazi Holocaust (‘The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath’). There has been a varying interest among students in the course since 2016, when I transformed it from a summer course into a regular course (2014–15: 27 students; 2016: 62 students; 2017: 79 students; 2018: 74 students; 2019: 81 students; 2020: 97 students; 2021: 58 students; 2022: 73 students; 2023: 90 students). A new challenge came in 2019 when UNSW Sydney decided to introduce a new academic calendar with trimesters, which effectively shortened our teaching term from 12 to 9 weeks. As a consequence, I had to combine but also exclude several topics.

Teaching the Holocaust in Australia can be challenging, perhaps more so than other history courses. The subject touches upon sensitive topics, students come to the classroom with preconceived ideas formed by popular representations in public history and there is also a question about the relevance of the subject for Australian students. The combination of the potentially adverse reactions of students to the topics discussed in courses on genocides, and the belief of some students that they already have expertise in the subject, should inform Holocaust educators’ teaching philosophy in different ways than that of history teachers in other areas. History educators at Australian universities often need to cater to both humanities and non-humanities students. Driven by the need to increase the enrolments in our classes, we make our courses attractive to students who take them as part of their core curriculum as well as those who enrol as part of their general education. Courses on modern history, World War II and the Holocaust tend to attract significant numbers of non-history students. In Semester 1, 2017, I conducted an anonymous survey in the course and out of 79 students, only 22 had declared history as their major or minor at the time, while 34 students clearly came from non-humanities disciplines—often, for example, from media, law and fine arts—but there was also a sizeable cohort of science students.

This realisation of the diversity of the cohort has informed my design of the curriculum and the summative assessment tasks, as well as formative in-class exercises that aim to stimulate students’ interest in the topic and offer sufficient historical background to ensure that all students can benefit from the lectures and tutorials. Concurrently, I would argue that the diversity of our student cohort is beneficial for our teaching practice. It allows us to develop new approaches to the subject matter that make the course inclusive to all who enrol. In the following, I introduce the structure of the Holocaust history course I teach and briefly outline the three main educational approaches I use to encourage deeper student engagement with the study material and help students to realise the relevance of the course for Australia in the 2020s.

I divide the structure of the course into two parts. The aim of my lectures is to offer a long historical overview of the history of the Holocaust, including the origins of religious anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism at the beginning of the course, and then a brief history of the Holocaust aftermath at the end of the course. Tutorials are more thematic, each introducing students to a particular topic (e.g. the role of Nazi propaganda in the Holocaust; current representation in film), a specific concept (e.g. bystanders), or a historiographical debate (the Goldhagen-Browning debate on perpetrators⁵; Jewish ‘collaboration’ and resistance, and so on). The current structure of the course has allowed me to create an inclusive environment that caters to various students’ needs, giving a broad historical overview to some, while challenging others.

Further, I regularly elicit informal feedback on the course design from my students. In 2017, I designed a survey with the aim of learning more about students’ academic backgrounds and their expectations—for example, in terms of the topics they would like to discuss in the course. A number of students confirmed that they had no background knowledge about the Holocaust and what they did know often came from films, novels and media, or from their trips to Holocaust museums and sites of former concentration and extermination camps. They also noted that their previous knowledge was skewed by the media and film industry and that they wanted to learn ‘what happened’ during the war. On the other hand, only a small number gave specific suggestions about what they would like to learn. They proposed topics that are often not covered in Holocaust courses, or at least not as thoroughly as other themes. For example, they would like to discuss the aftermath of the Holocaust (topics such as survivors’ trauma and the impact of the Holocaust on human rights discourses). Another topic that appeared in the questionnaire was on the responses of the Allies (USA, Britain and so on) to the Holocaust, as a case study of how the contemporary world responds to genocides and to gross human rights violations. The most important message of this survey is that students want to see the relevance of the Holocaust today. They do not want a purely historical course. While the survey yielded much food for thought, we need to take into consideration the low response rate and hence further research is necessary to confirm these conclusions.

The following three examples illustrate the ways in which I have been addressing the educational challenges outlined above, particularly the diversity of the student cohort, students’ preconceived ideas about the Holocaust and the doubts about the relevance of the subject.

Example 1: Hands-on history

I have stressed the need for students to engage with an integrated history of the Holocaust that includes voices of the victims and introduces students to everyday experiences of life under the Nazis. My aim is to complement scholarly historiographical discussions with examples of real-life stories from the Holocaust in the form of video testimonies (as well as written testimonies). One of the main highlights of this course, according to students’ testimonials, has been a guest talk by a Holocaust survivor (Peter Rossler, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and other smaller camps; or Olga Horak, a survivor of Auschwitz from Slovakia). Unfortunately, almost 80 years after the end of the war, it is no longer possible to invite survivors to the classroom, and we now need to rely on recorded testimonies that we can use in our lectures and tutorials. Fortunately, significant resources, including recorded Holocaust testimonies, are available online. Students also visit the Sydney Jewish Museum’s comprehensive Holocaust exhibition. They have consistently commended this methodological approach, which we can call ‘hands-on history’. This approach has made the study material easily accessible to non-humanities students also.

Example 2: In-class formative exercise and students’ unlearning

We live in a world where we are constantly reminded about Nazi crimes as the epitome of gross human rights violations. However, this means that we, as educators, need to challenge students’ preconceived ideas that are often based on the tabloid press and Hollywood film industry. Students’ unlearning thus forms a significant part of my teaching practice in ARTS2285. For example, the case of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is one of the most intriguing topics of Holocaust historiography and of Holocaust teaching and learning. Students often come to the classroom with the belief that Jews did not resist the Nazi persecution, which often implicitly leads to a portion of the guilt being placed on the victims (the infamous statement that they were ‘led like sheep to the slaughter’; students sometimes voice these sentiments even in the classroom).

I have devised an in-class exercise that allows for a deeper learning experience, tests higher levels of Bloom’s learning taxonomy⁶ and challenges students’ preconceived ideas about the Holocaust. In preparation, students read an article by Yehuda Bauer (‘Jewish Resistance: Myth or Reality?’)⁷ that offers a broad definition of resistance, which they are asked to critique. I open the tutorial by presenting students with three complex stories from the Holocaust: 1) Zivia Lubetkin and Rachel Rudnitzki, female ghetto prisoners, who actively joined the armed resistance against the Germans; 2) Emanuel Ringelblum, a male historian, who, during the war, collected documentary material in the Warsaw Ghetto; and 3) the story of Janusz Korczak, a famous Jewish educator, who decided to join his orphaned pupils on the way to the death camp even though he could have saved his own life (I play a video clip from a feature film by Andrzej Wajda).⁸ After presenting these stories I ask students to debate which, if any, of these cases were acts of resistance and whether we can relate them to the concepts introduced by Bauer, such as Amidah (literally standing up against) and sanctification of life. This exercise, in combination with the prescribed readings, contributes to a lively discussion that broadens students’ understanding of the term ‘resistance’ and of the Jewish experience during the war. It allows me to include an interpretation of ‘resistance’ that challenges students’ strong belief that Jews did not resist during the war, allows for critical thinking about the concept in relation to social life in the ghettoes, and is also a suitable way to include a gender-balanced view of the Holocaust.

Example 3: Local context in Holocaust education

There are numerous reasons why teaching and studying the Holocaust is still relevant in 2023. I approach the subject from the perspective of an educator who teaches the Holocaust in a country that is geographically and mentally removed from the ‘Old Continent’ where the genocide happened, and in a society that does not really believe it had (or has) any historical connections to the Holocaust and does not consider itself part of the ‘Holocaust geography’. The Holocaust is simply the story of Europe and of European history.

My strategy to address these assumptions has been to place more emphasis on the local Australian context and Australian responses to the Holocaust.⁹ This decision stems from my firm belief that by studying the Holocaust in our local context we may keep the history relevant to new generations of Australians. I employ various methods to make connections between Australia and the Holocaust. The theme is now part of the formative and summative assessment. The assessment consists of a personal reflection on the public representation of the Holocaust in Australia, in which students discuss why Holocaust commemoration and education are still relevant in the Australian context. Unlike a standard essay, I encourage students to work with online sources and to present their personal views. Students are expected to write approximately 1,000 words, which, perhaps, limits the space they have to develop their thoughts on the topic, but, in general, is an adequate length for this task.

The exercise requires a deeper learning engagement with the course material. Although this is a relatively short assessment task, I ask students to go beyond topics normally discussed and analysed in Holocaust courses. In the core of the reflection, students select a specific example, or a case study, that supports the argument that the study and commemoration of the Holocaust is still relevant in Australia in the twenty-first century. The key task is to consider the question of how they would bring the history of the Holocaust closer to a new generation of Australians. They are asked to introduce the case study and justify their selection, which:

• could be a specific example from the history of the Holocaust that connects the Australian population to the events in Europe; they could demonstrate that the Holocaust was not just a distant event that took place far away in Europe (e.g. Jewish refugees in Australia, the Evian Conference on refugees in 1938, William Cooper’s protest, and so on)
• could be an example from Australian history, not directly related to the Holocaust (e.g. from the colonial settler society, or from modern Indigenous history); they could argue that the study and commemoration of the Holocaust could also be a way to understand our own history
• could be an example from contemporary society in Australia or worldwide that can be better understood when related to the history of the Holocaust (e.g. the rise of anti-Semitism, the refugee crisis or gross human rights violations).

Not wanting to restrict students’ imaginations, or force them to agree with my interpretation of the need to relate the history of the Holocaust to our Australian context, I emphasise that they can also argue that the Holocaust is such a universal symbol of suffering and human rights abuses that there is no need to highlight its importance and relevance by relating it to our local context or to contemporary events.

In the final step I ask students to include additional evidence in the form of an image or photograph to support their argument and contextualise it with the main case study.

Holocaust pedagogy will continue to evolve in response to new challenges that may emerge in the future. In Australia, there are solid foundations for the continuing development of educational approaches, with the subject being taught at institutions of secondary and tertiary education and in Holocaust museums across the country. Educators will need to continue having discussions about how to adequately engage new, diverse cohorts of students who enter our classroom in the future.

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1. 1 This is an updated version of an article I published in 2018 in the Australian Humanities Review.

2. 2 Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt, eds, Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 14.

3. 3 Courses related to the history of the Holocaust were taught by Professor Konrad Kwiet (now resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum and emeritus professor at the University of Sydney), Associate Professor Julie Kalman (currently at Monash University), Dr Michael Abrahams-Sprod (Sydney) and Dr Ari Lander (Sydney Jewish Museum).

4. 4 The other courses are taught by Dr Ruth Balint, Dr Andrew Beattie and Dr David Blaazer.

5. 5 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: Penguin, 2001); Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1996).

6. 6 Patricia Armstrong, ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’. Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching, accessed 2 December 2023, cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.

7. 7 Yehuda Bauer, ‘Jewish Resistance: Myth or Reality?’, in Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 119–42.

8. 8 Andrzej Wajda (director), Korczak (Poland-Germany: Vision Film, 1990).

9. 9 For example, the University of Sydney also includes Australia-related topics in its course on the history of the Holocaust, see ‘JCTC3002: The Holocaust: History and Aftermath’, accessed 2 December 2023, www.sydney.edu.au/units/JCTC3002/2022-S2C-ND-CC.