Giving History a Voice
Our Year 10 History students had a moving incursion via Zoom with the Sydney Jewish Museum this week, where they gained insight into Holocaust history from a deeply personal perspective.
Each year, 91黑料不打烊’s History Department takes our Year 10 History students to the Sydney Jewish Museum, whose work to educate and inspire visitors on the history of the Holocaust inspires our young people to be more empathetic and motivated to make a positive difference in the world. This year, due to the current lockdown situation, our students attended an online incursion instead hosted by Community and Education Officer, Sandy Hollis.
From pograms, to ghettos, to gas chambers, to mass shootings, to concentration camps, the Holocaust left a devastating stain on Germany and led to the death of more than six million European Jews. Many more survived, but were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.
As Sandy explained to our students, it’s normal to find some of the material confronting, but it also means that it’s making us think deeply about the Holocaust and its impact on ordinary people. One of the most powerful ways that the Museum helps students to understand the effect of the Holocaust is by sharing some of the eyewitness accounts of its survivors.
It’s hard for our young people to connect with a number as big as 6 million, but they do connect with individual stories. It is these heart-wrenching stories of cruelty, suffering, loss and rebuilding their lives that helps us to gain insight and understanding about this period of history. And more importantly, it stops the world from forgetting about the greatest act of brutality and genocide in modern memory.
After talking with the students about the difference between testimony and memory, Sandy played video excerpts of individual survivors telling their stories. She asked the students to listen carefully to how their voices changed when they recounted their stories, particularly when they spoke about the pain of being parted from their parents or their loved ones. It was clear to all our students that what had happened to the survivors during the Holocaust continued to have a profound influence many decades later.
The students heard from Francine, who still suffers from abandonment issues today after her father was forced to leave her on a farm when she was only four-years-old in order to protect her from the Nazis. They heard from Jack, who had to survive alone in the ghetto aged 11-years-old after his parents were sent to Auschwitz. Eddie spoke about the horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938 and the inhumane conditions of the trains to the death camps. Olga described the feeling of being ‘branded’ when as part of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, she was forced to wear a yellow Star of David badge. She broke down in tears as she described the last time she saw her older sister, who was taken away by the Nazis when she turned 16. George also spoke about the horror of seeing the Nazis finding his mother and sister, who had been hiding in an attic in the ghetto to avoid being taken to the concentration camps.
It was a moving incursion, which had a profound impact on our students, prompting them to reflect on how they think of others, how communities treat people and how they understand history. Above all, it made them realise that the lessons from the atrocities sanctioned by Adolf Hitler’s administration and carried out by often ordinary people must never be forgotten.
In the words of Holocaust survivor, 100-year-old Eddie Jaku, author of The Happiest Man on Earth, who was sent to Auschwitz as a young man and escaped the death marches at the end of the war by hiding in a cave and eating slugs and snails to survive: “You must not hate. Hate is a disease. It destroy your enemy, but also you.”
A huge thank you to the Sydney Jewish Museum and its volunteers. And thank you to our History Department for organising the incursion.