Yad Vashem confab uses art to teach the Holocaust

Attendees at a Yad Vashem-hosted conference saw the Holocaust through art Wednesday morning.

Educators from countries all over the world attended this four-day conference to learn how to better teach the Holocaust and make it relevant for their students. Art was one of the ways. Lectures focused on topics such as music that came out of the Holocaust era from those in ghettos and imprisoned in camps, films inspired by the Holocaust and art that portrayed the experience.

“The goals of the conference are to explore how schools around the world are teaching the Holocaust today, and in what way Yad Vashem can assist in the process, and the future of Holocaust studies,” conference organizer Ephraim Kaye said in a press release from the museum.

Shirli Gilbert, director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton, played several clips of songs written around the time of the Holocaust that express despair, hope and everything in between.

She gave the example of “Zog Nit Keyn Mol,” one of the most popular surviving songs of this period, which was written by a 20-year-old partisan and adopted as the partisan hymn.

Although Gilbert said she was unaware of any recordings of music straight from the ghettos and camps, she emphasized the importance of music reconstructed soon after the Holocaust and sung by survivors. One clip she played was a recording of an 18-year-old Holocaust survivor singing in 1946.

“What’s so compelling about them is that they bring us closer to being able to imagine what singing inside those places sounded like,” she said.

Yad Vashem Visual Center director Liat Benhabib lectured on films released shortly after the Holocaust. Film was a different sort of art during the 1930s and 1940s compared to music or literature, because at that time it was a relatively new art.

In the early postwar period, or what Benhabib called the first generation, most Holocaust films portrayed stories of rebirth as part of the survivors’ acculturation process, she said. These films were widely successful in the new state of Israel as well as in Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

During what Benhabib called the second generation, which still continuing today, movies tell the stories of communities, characters and historical personalities that were sometimes previously unknown to the general public.

“They challenge us as viewers to figure out the whole picture from a fragment of a puzzle,” Benhabib said of these films. Moving forward, “I believe that film will be even more important in shaping Holocaust remembrance as a means of coping with Holocaust continued disruption of our life.”

In the last session of the morning, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz survivor Yehuda Bacon talked about how he used art to communicate his time in both places to “so-called ‘normal people.’”

“There was the famous wall between them and us,” he said. “How can I reach them? I have done something wrong... maybe they don’t understand me or maybe I don’t have the right language for them.”

Bacon showed photos of his artwork that depicted scenes from the ghetto and the concentration camps.

“Art helped me to overcome [these] very bad times, and I felt obliged to tell you this story,” he said.