Textbook aims to correct Holocaust misunderstanding

ALTHOUGH EDUCATORS may increasingly be turning to digital tools, there is still a place for textbooks.

Some 50,000 free copies of a new textbook on the Holocaust have been distributed this year to 1,400 secondary schools in the country.

Understanding the Holocaust – How and why did it happen? was put together by the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London.

When the centre’s executive director Professor Stuart Foster and a colleague examined 21 textbooks which covered the Holocaust for schools, they found “lots of inaccuracies” and other flaws.

Only two focused specifically on the Holocaust but they were published 15 or more years ago. The others included the Holocaust as part of a broader history. “The quality of many of them was poor,” Professor Foster said. “

So with support from the Pears Foundation and the Toni Schiff Memorial Fund, the centre’s team decided to produce a new one of their own.

In particular, the 98-page publication was intended to address some of the problems the centre had uncovered in a major survey on knowledge of the Holocaust among schoolchildren five years ago. More than two-thirds, for example, struggled to understand term “antisemitism”.

“A number of units are designed to address key issues that we felt were missing,” Professor Foster explained. “So the first unit is Jewish life in Europe before the War, before 1933.

“Most young people didn’t really know much about pre-War Jewish life, they didn’t know much about pre-War European life, so we felt that was the starting point.”

Its aim is to ensure that children have a basic grasp of the chronology and geography of events. “Most young people think the Holocaust happened in Germany,” he said.

It puts a lot of emphasis on the “Holocaust by bullets”, the mass shootings carried out by the Eisatzgruppen, the mobile killing units.

Most young people had little idea of how Jewish people responded to and resisted the Holocaust, he said.

And the textbook also looks at survivors in the aftermath of the War. “There’s an assumption the sun came out and everything was rosy and of course we know for many people it was very difficult — going back to their homes that weren’t there any more and they were still shunned and still faced antisemitism.”

The centre’s most recent research has highlighted the positive impact of specialist training for teachers in the subject. The textbook, it hopes, will be another valuable aid in countering ignorance and misunderstanding.