How are we supposed to reflect on, learn, and teach about events that we never experienced directly? As educators, we often assume the answer lies in the concept of ābeing thereāā: The notion of experiencing historyāthrough a direct encounter with the sites where history took place, and by way of seeing, hearing, and feeling. 1 Intimacy with the material, so the argument goes, facilitates interest, authenticates knowledge, and produces venues for personal growth and reflectionāall of which promises to ensure a deep, personal engagement that is not only to stay with the learner but is also said to nurture ethical thinking, generate empathy , and reconfigure a personās worldview. 2
Much of this goes back to Deweyās seminal and much quoted work on experiential education that tasks educators with creating opportunities for students to āactively engage in the learning process,ā and with providing hands-on, intentional experiences. 3 Holocaust education is perhaps at the forefront of implementing ideas of experiential learning in an attempt to engage students in more meaningful, interested, and purposeful waysāoutside the classroom. Such opportunities are realized most fundamentally through the experience at the physical structures of historical sites that were once central to the organization and execution of the Holocaust. Scholars agree that the built environment, geography, ruins, and artefacts are powerful in augmenting other, existing, forms of methodology and analysis, namely narrative history or visual representations . 4
The encounters with my students at historical sites of trauma and violence, chronicled here, seem to suggest likewise; to begin with, there is indeed a widespread desire by the learner for experiencing and āliving history,ā whereby a past and otherwise distant event such as the Holocaust can somehow be folded into a personal and local memory. 5 āBeing there brought it home for me,ā is certainly one of the most popular expressions among my traveling students over the course of three years of leading a Holocaust study abroad program to Europe. This experience often culminated for the students in the visit to Auschwitz:
Auschwitz was important to see. It made me really think about the victims, it broke down the number barrier of not being able to fathom what eleven million people is. I can envision it now.
One of the curators at the Auschwitz Memorial Museum endorses the uniqueness of the experience of ābeing thereā during our visit by stating: āPeople come here to feel it, touch it, experience it.ā
When I first began thinking about developing a Holocaust study abroad program I was already investedāpersonally and academicallyāin the phenomenon of memorials and museum sites as spaces of understanding and remembering the past; the ways in which memorials and museums are āat workā and attract millions of people, or, more precisely, tourists; the ways in which societies such as mine (German) are continuously imbued with performances of remembrance and commemoration at those sites; and the ways in which those sites grapple with this interplay of practices of remembering and forgetting, of warning and teaching, of preserving and altering historical memory. How can it be that former killing sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau attract millions of people each year?
Most fundamentally, ābeing thereā is said to assist in, literally, envisaging the depth (and scale) of the event. 6 Students report, for instance, that seeing the large area of Auschwitz-Birkenau and āthe immense collection of personal items, family photos, portraits, clothesā assists them to āimagine the scaleā of systemic mass violence. With that come specific sensory features that accompany spaceāsmells, sounds, and images . 7 Some students claim to notice that the lavatories in the old barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau āstill smell like human feces,ā or simply that āthe sky was gray ā matching the āsolemnness of the day,ā adding to their memory of the suffering endured at these sites.
More importantlyāat least for meāare the accidental experiences of ābeing thereā; the things one cannotābut would expect to see; or the things one notices but would not expect to see. One student describes such an experience when approaching the site of Dachau: āthe first thing that shocked me was the fact that there were residential areas so close to the memorial site of the camp.ā Such reflections complicate for students the ways in which they structure their knowledge of the Holocaust. In this case, it unsettles the often neat and tidy categorization of perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and bystanders; the lines between these actors become blurred. We meet residents of the town of Dachau whose balconies overlook the site of the former concentration camp; they tell my students that moving to the town of Dachau was for economic reasonsāhousing is much more affordable here for a family of four than in Munich , leaving an imprint with my cohort on the concepts of memory, forgetting, and moving on that cannot be gained in any meaningful way outside this personal encounter at the site. One of the most common reflections on the program is aptly described by one student as the importance of āseeing shades of grey.ā
āBeing thereā (as opposed to āhereā at home) means also that students often assume different identities, roles, and responsibilities. Students notice that they take on the different perspectives of local communities and experts (like the families of Dachau with whom they find themselves sympathizing), and that they are confronted with scenarios, questions, and approaches to learning about the Holocaust that only reveal themselves by being at the sites, places, and cities themselves. Students reflect on their role as global citizens with an awareness of conflicts today; as one student commented: āthe world and conflicts make more sense to me now that I exposed myself to the Holocaust.ā
Yet, how such encounters with past human suffering at sites are to be accomplished and structured exactly, what the modes of āseeing, hearing, and feelingā of experiential learning ought to be, and what these experiences ultimately culminate to, is less clear. What should and should not, or can and cannot be seen, heard, and viewed? When is the exposure to the material on site perhaps too intimate, too emotional? How far is the role of the educator imbued in creating a productive encounter for the learnerāand to what effect? And lastly, what exactly is being brought home? What kind of knowledge is being incubated by the cohort, and how the experiences of ābeing thereā translate into concrete opportunities for attitude and activity today, is certainly less agreed upon.
The purpose of this book is not, and cannot be, to fill that gap by producing empirical data on the ways in which teaching my students at sites of trauma can yield specific, measurable, outcomes. Instead, the collection of stories and observations here seek to foreground those very moments when the value and impact of ābeing thereā was rendered most challenging for me as an educator. I argue that this shift in focus has the potential to illuminate and query some of the assumptions we make regarding Holocaust education and its effects. Ultimately, I am interested in tracing an essential question: To what extent may there be a conflict between our ethical imperative to remember a catastrophic past, and the impetus to find ways to teach about it? 8
The Program
Every summer, twenty-five outstanding undergraduate students from across the campus of a private university in the northeast of the USA, travel to Germany and Poland, with the objective to learn about the Holocaust at the very sites where it occurred. We travel for five weeks in two countries and five cities (Munich , Nuremberg , Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow)ādestinations that are deemed central to the rise of National Socialism and to the planning and execution of the Holocaust. The group explores three concentration camps (Dachau, RavensbrĆ¼ck, Sachsenhausen ), and spends two days at Auschwitz with an overnight stay adjacent to the death camp. We visit memorials, museums, and documentation centers and participate in workshops, study days, and seminars at those sites, and with support of the educational programs offered on site. Students encounter local communities, experts, and survivors of the Holocaust in structured, as well as unstructured, activities.
Academically and pedagogically, this study abroad program rests on the commitment to what is termed ādouble attentiveness .ā 9 The term, invoked by Simon and Eppert in the context of witnessing testimonies and the obligations of the bearer of such witnessing, is composed of two parts, or forms. One part of the attentiveness involves the ability to fold learned and observed information into specific procedures and templates of meaning that validate the historical information. For instance, the ...