Why Use Survivor Testimony?

As a starting point when considering why we should use of survivor testimony in Holocaust education, educators must consider a relatively simple idea: the Holocaust involved human lives and affected real people. Statistics and facts alone are not going to have much impact on the minds of students. Survivor testimony allows educators to bridge the gap between the historical knowledge they learn in their classrooms to the real world implications of that knowledge. It also allows students to learn about the atrocities in a life-affirming way by showing that there were survivors as teaching only horrors may be rejected by students.[1] Using real survivor testimony also has the function of validating these stories and, especially when they are presented alongside primary documents and within their proper historical context, can leave students with something they will never forget.[2]

How Should Survivor Testimony be Used?

The Holocaust is often taught as a narrative account which emphasizes “lessons to be learned” and this method leads to the pitfall where students understand how such education functions and become good at giving the right answer without internalizing the moral lessons being taught.[3] This method also runs the risk of oversimplifying the past and prevents students from developing their own nuanced understandings of the topic. Therefore, adopting a disciplinary approach to history that encourages students to develop their critical thinking by incorporating different narratives, looking at different interpretations, and analyzing different claims on the basis of historical evidence.[4] Survivor testimony can have a valuable role to play in this context, especially considered the vast amount of online resources available with clips of survivor testimony that can be incorporated into a variety of lessons.

What are the Pitfalls?

To avoid romanticizing the Holocaust, it is important to emphasize the small percentage of people who survived and the uniqueness of each survivor testimony thereby bridging the gap between historical knowledge and survivor testimony. For this reason, it is important before presenting survivor testimony to put survivor’s testimony in context and provide adequate background on the larger historical processes and events surrounding the survivor’s experiences. It is especially ill-advised to use any type of simulations to try to put students in the shoes of people during the Holocaust, as it can have the negative effect of making students feel that they truly know what the victims of the Holocaust experienced and that it actually the accounts are an exaggeration.[5]  On this point, Judith Suissa discusses that it is the role of the educator to ensure that the realities of the Holocaust are engaged with by students, but not in so far as to diminish the atrocities of this part of human history.[6] She notes that testimonies play an important role in balancing this complex task.

Where to Go Next?

Though Holocaust education is not necessarily human rights or genocide education, it can be an important facet of these programs if the Holocaust can be related to the personal lives or current events of their students.[7] In Canada for example, linking the experiences of the Holocaust to certain aspects of the experience of indigenous peoples can have the impact of galvanizing the emotions of empathy survivor testimonies can elicit to issues that students can act on now. Facing History and Ourselves uses the Holocaust as a central case study to look at more contemporary issues of genocide around the world, while also empowering students to take action. The concept of well-known Swiss educator, Johann Pestalozzi, of learning by “head, heart, and hand” can be especially helpful in connecting Holocaust education to broader goals of human rights and genocide education.[8] The history of the Holocaust can be the head, the empathy produced by survivor testimonies can be the heart, and the connections to contemporary issues and working to address them as a class can be the hand. Taking Holocaust education beyond the classroom in this way can therefore allow survivor testimony have the true impact on students.

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[1] Karel Fracapane and Matthias Hass, Holocaust Education in a Global Context (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2014), 179.

[2] Samuel Totten, Holocaust Education: Issues and Approaches (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2002), 123.

[3] Fracapane and Hass, Holocaust Education in a Global Context, 108.

[4] Fracapane and Hass, Holocaust Education in a Global Context, 109.

[5] Samuel Totten, Holocaust Education: Issues and Approaches (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2002), 123.

[6] Judith Suissa, “Testimony, Holocaust Education and Making the Unthinkable Thinkable,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 50, no. 2 (2016): 295-6.

[7] Anja Mihr, “Why Holocaust Education is Not always Human Rights Education,” Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 4 (2015): 525-544.

[8] Monique Eckman, “Is Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust Relevant for Human Rights Education?” in Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony, edited by Thomas Trezise (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 60.