Date:
Author: Regan Lipes, Extended Sessional Instructor, English and Comparative Literature, MacEwan University
Original article: https://theconversation.com/gen-z-knowledge-about-the-holocaust-matters-for-ongoing-reconciliation-with-a-troubled-history-235296
Since last Oct. 7, the world has seen mass death catalyzed by terrorist attacks in Israel, Israel’s mission to recover hostages still being detained and retaliation in Gaza — and now a long-dreaded war erupting through the Middle East.
As a scholar of Jewish and Holocaust literature, in the past year following Oct. 7, I have been aware that how students engage with the history of the Holocaust has been impacted.
Eighty thousand Israelis remain displaced from their homes in the north. Over 40,000 Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza, and and following a United Nations expert accusing Israel of acts of genocide, UN delegates have amplified calls for an immediate ceasefire.
Others assert Israel’s actions are a defensive response. While all Israeli citizens have been affected by violence in Israel, Israel is a Jewish state, and the kind of violence and hate directed at Israel is being felt by Jews globally. For many Jews the Oct. 7 attacks themselves resonated hauntingly of Kristallnacht, with the Jewish people again put in a position of needing to defend their right to exist.
The definition of genocide acknowledged in the international Genocide Convention drew on the term coined by Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin who fled persecution of the meticulously orchestrated genocide against European Jewry during the Second World War.
Globally, we are seeing a time of re-aligning geopolitics, including both the Global South and West becoming increasingly aware of pro-Palestinian perspectives. Many Gen Zs have been quick to rally against Zionism.
At the same time, Holocaust denialism, antisemitic hate acts and terrorist threats have accompanied a rise in anti-Israel sentiment — with frightening effects on Jews globally, sometimes fanned by propagandists seeking to exploit and augment conflict and polarization.
Even before events of the past year, as the 1940s recede in time, fewer and fewer Gen Zs have identified themselves as feeling knowledgeable about the Holocaust. The way knowledge is transmitted must adapt with the times.
(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
Memory through time
In 2019 I was the faculty fellow for a partnership between the Auschwitz Jewish Center and the Museum of Jewish Heritage (MJH). As a scholar I have had the benefit of meeting with Holocaust survivors to learn about their experiences.
During my fellowship, the ongoing question rattling in my brain was how to safeguard the lived testimonies of survivors as their numbers dwindle.
When I teach literature of the Holocaust and second-generation efforts to preserve memory, I have noticed students’ limited knowledge of the Holocaust when I do an informal poll of what they know already. Many students admit an awareness limited exclusively to Hollywood films.
Six-part documentary
Director Joe Berlinger’s recent documentary Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial is conscious of deficits in Gen Z education and seeks to remedy this.
Berlinger’s six-part Netflix documentary takes a unique approach to examining and exploring Hitler’s rise to power and the lasting global impact.
He frames this analysis by using the writings and broadcasts of journalist and foreign corespondent William L. Shirer, who authored the iconic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), in concert with narration from Shirer’s granddaughter, Deirdre van Dyk.
Within the context of her grandfather’s historically significant coverage of the European political landscape throughout the 1930s and 40s, van Dyk is able to offer insights regarding how Shirer spoke about this period going beyond his public writings.
Preserving history
On an online discussion panel organized by the MJH in July 2024, Berlinger acknowledged the plethora of documentaries examining the Second World War, but explained that this work is a targeted effort to preserve history while connecting and resonating with Gen Z viewers.
Van Dyk’s participation plays a key role in bridging the present with the lived experience of Shirer, a witness of Nazi corruption and totalitarianism.
Similarly second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors are instrumental in ensuring that their parents and grandparents’ suffering and trauma can be used to caution current learners who will be the politicians, jurists and educators of the future about dangers of antisemitism.
Alberta initiative
An initiative in Alberta, the Second Voices Project is working to help Gen Z students understand the Holocaust in a way that feels authentic and less like distant history.
The initiative, with the support of the Government of Alberta, uses video testimony given by survivors, and pairs this with discussion, commentary and observations provided by their children and grandchildren.
Robert Jackson, chief counsel of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, noted in his opening statement at the Nuremberg Trial in 1945:
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Jackson’s remarks now seem prophetic as society reexamines how best to impart this vital knowledge.
Increased consciousness
When the Second Voices Project travels to secondary and post-secondary institutions it is with the hope that seeds for increased tolerance and social consciousness be planted.
(Simon and Schuster)
During the winter 2024 semester, in a Jewish literature course I taught, I saw the Second Voices Project in action. The course sees students examine the search for resolution in untenable situations, with reporter Erin Einhorn’s The Pages In Between.
They grapple with depictions of trauma and extreme loss in Cynthia Ozick’s short story The Shawl and examine how American-born Jews negotiated feelings of misplaced guilt following learning about the extent of the Holocaust.
Accompanied by a Holocaust education specialist from the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, my students met second-generation survivor and retired physician Dr. Francie Cyngiser.
Cyngiser’s parents survived the Nazi concentration camps, and she brought her father, Sidney Cyngiser’s, recorded Shoah Foundation testimony, narrated by her son and nephew, to my class.
Sidney Cyngiser was dedicated to combating Holocaust denial by sharing his story. Instead of simply watching a video of Cyngiser testifying, the documentary was contextualized for students by inter-generational survivors not much younger than their parents.
Addressing trauma fatigue
Although Berlinger’s viewers cannot speak directly with van Dyk the way my students did with Dr. Cyngiser, his documentary is an important innovation to engage Gen Z learners.
To appeal to this targeted viewership, the Shirer family consented to use AI voice approximations of William Shirer’s writings to help narrate Berlinger’s documentary. Although original recordings from his news broadcasts also feature prominently, many of his diaries, smuggled out of Nazi Germany at great risk, needed vocalization for the film.
By adapting, Holocaust educators can also combat trauma fatigue which can impair capacity for awareness, recognition and response. In Germany, where Holocaust education is mandatory, feelings of frustration over inherited guilt for the Holocaust can breed apathy and resentment.
Both pro-Zionist and Zionist-critical Jews have highlighted that such sentiments are dangerous in the current global climate.
Apathy fails to serve any humanitarian function and dangerously anaesthetises all sides to the pain of others.
The German term Vergangenheitsbewältigung describes the process of ongoing reconciliation with a troubled history. The past is a reality that humanity as whole must contend with, but a lack of understanding is fertile ground for denial, revisionism and antisemitism.
I cannot help but wonder if greater awareness of Holocaust history, and political and cultural histories of how to safeguard human rights, would promote more tolerance and compassion universally.