The Importance of Holocaust Education in Schools
The aim of Holocaust education should never be to introduce young people to the details of the horrors of the Holocaust, but to help them to understand how it could happen: what led up to it, and to recognise how conspiracy theories, fake news and disinformation lead to prejudice. And how prejudice leads to racism – and when racism is allowed to flourish, then there is no limit to what can happen.
I give talks mainly to students in Year 6 who are in the last class of primary school. They are good listeners and generally uninhibited about interacting and asking searching questions. Some talks inevitably have to be on Zoom because of unmanageable distances, but there is an advantage because several schools can participate and I have spoken to as many as 500 children in one session. With a bit of technical luck, I can see them and they can see me as well as PowerPoint illustrations.
I talk about my own experiences as a child and how my cousin and I became the targets of racism and learned how antisemitism, surely the oldest form of racism, felt as well as what it meant. Our stories had very different outcomes: I was lucky and survived. I came to England with my parents. We discuss what refugees may bring with them and what and who they must leave behind and how that may feel. I encourage them to listen to others’ stories and to tell their own – we all have stories to tell and they help us to welcome strangers, not to fear them.
My cousin was not lucky. He was one of six million who were not lucky.
The children and I explore together what 6,000,000 means. We stand and I tell them that the late Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Jonathan Sachs, once worked out that if we stood for just one minute to commemorate each of the 6,000,000 we would be standing in this place for 11 years and 4 months.
We talk about who can do such things? and I stress that there are no bad people but only people who do bad things. I give examples of kindness: a child who played with me when the other children and teachers in my school shunned me and called me names, a man in the Nazi party, who knew and saved my father when he was arrested, and a doctor who took me to hospital, where Jews were not allowed, when I nearly lost a finger.
Eli Wiesel, an author, who witnessed the worst terrors of the Holocaust as a child in the camps, once said that when we tell our stories, we share the responsibility of being a witness and when enough of us become witnesses we may never let it happen again.
BY HEDI ARGENT
Hedi and her parents came to England as refugees from Austria in 1939. Hedi spent most of her working life in Social Work specialising in the adoption of older children and children with disabilities. She has written and edited more than twenty books on the subject and is still working and speaking in schools about the Holocaust and what it means to be a refugee. Hedi has recently written her own story and has donated the royalties from her book sales to the Foundation. She is also an ambassador for the Foundation.
