Genocide is merely social exclusion taken to an extreme. Its is vital that children have the skills to empathise with the victims of social exclusion as real people if they are to understand how terrible it is when discrimination spirals out of control. Stephen Smith discusses the teaching of a difficult subject.
The Holocaust was not a single event in history. It was a long and complex set of events which unfolded imperceptibly over 50 years and persecuted its victims over a 12-year period, across more than 20 countries. It twisted through the vicissitudes of the labyrinthine world of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
The Holocaust involved the development of a genocidal ideology aimed at a variety of groups of people − the Jews, the gypsies, the disabled, to name but a few. Persecutory policies were different for each group at different periods across the time frame; they also varied from country to country, even camp to camp. The system of persecution was a vast network of departments, individual bureaucrats and field units, each with their intersecting, often confusing, responsibilities. The roles of leadership, democracy, society, Church and State, the professions, the civil service have all taxed the minds of the most brilliant historians. Details of the destruction of the Jews, their history, culture, language and traditions, which spanned a thousand years in Europe, were erased.
The lack of evidence leaves a gaping hole in our knowledge. Yet the mass of documentation from the period is too vast to process fully. Just finding the names of the Jewish victims (of which there are now nearly five million) has taken 60 years and a global search – that is before we know much about them as people. The demands of this history have left historians with much to do to document the facts. The Holocaust has confounded philosophers, theologians, psychologists, criminologists and social scientists of many disciplines. It is a complex, demanding set of events with challenging questions about its causes and confounding hypotheses about its consequences. It defies description, still has little explanation and has left more questions than answers. As Charlotte Delbo, one of the brilliant victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau pointed out, it is ‘a useless knowledge’ to acquire.
And yet we dare to teach this history to our children.