How Holocaust Memoirs Can Increase Student Empathy and Understanding of Racism
This article was published in French by Audrey Bélanger as “Cultiver l’empathie des élèves et leur désir de mieux comprendre diverses manifestations du racisme à travers un récit mémoriel : l’exemple de matricule E96.” Les Cahiers de l’AQPF 14 (3): 52–56, 2023. Translated into English by Dawson Campbell, 2024.
This article aims to shed light on the educational significance of Holocaust survivor memoirs, as exemplified by a case study conducted with Grade 11 students. First-person accounts of the Holocaust are textual spaces that not only humanize the history of a complex and sensitive reality but also offer the potential to give a voice and put a face to the people who were persecuted and ostracized because of their differences. In reading these accounts, students discover the traces of a personal, familial and collective life in the time before, during and after World War II. This exploratory reading, which calls on the reader’s empathy, in combination with analytical reading, can help facilitate students’ understanding of various manifestations of racism — an ideology that can materialize in extremes, such as genocide (Bélanger 2022).
In a school setting, reading a memoir alongside other documents (historical, fictional, etc.) can lead students to reflect on the context in which the text was produced, prompting them (perhaps most importantly) to consider the significance of such an account today. Narrative sources gently invite the reader to enter a relationship with the “Other” and to reflect on and discuss relevant and universal issues. The critical exploration of a memoir helps students create a deeper, more personal connection to the experiences of genocide survivors, cultivate empathy and develop a desire to investigate through first-person accounts.
The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program: A Relevant Educational Resource
The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program provides teachers in Canada with Holocaust survivor memoirs, free of charge, to support the teaching and learning of this grave moment in history. These testimonies are an effective means of developing social cohesion, broadening students’ perspectives and improving their understanding of the unique journeys of those who immigrated to Canada after the war.
Intersubjective exchanges in class, guided by a teacher, help students distance themselves from their own subjective experience. Creating such a distance is even more pertinent when considering the Holocaust, as strong emotions are prone to preclude critical reflection (Bélanger 2022). Furthermore, because of their accessibility and diversity, the Azrieli Foundation’s memoirs can be used to cultivate a passion for books and history and can serve as resources for developing students’ reading skills by inviting them to choose from a wide range of personal and historical experiences (e.g., age, country, identity).
In Paul-Henri Rips’ memoir, E/96: Fate Undecided (Matricule E/96), Rips relates his survival in Belgium during the Nazi occupation. The reader is immersed in the story of an ordinary Jewish boy who, in 1940, has his life turned upside down:
Through the words of Paul-Henri, narrator and focal point of this story of survival, we are called on to engage in a reading that draws on emotional connection, contextualization and multiple perspectives (Endacott and Brooks 2018). Such a reading can facilitate the development of students’ critical thinking and civic education.
An Interdisciplinary Activity Centred on E/96: Fate Undecided
E/96: Fate Undecided — studied alongside other documents on the history of the Holocaust — was the focal point of an interdisciplinary French/history learning activity, informally tested on a group of Grade 11 students at Bishop’s College in Sherbrooke, Quebec. As part of their Modern World course, students were invited to study and reflect on the Holocaust using analysis tools, including those proposed in the “Étudier les genocides” (Studying Genocides) guide (Hirsch and Moisan 2022). Students were also asked to broaden their knowledge by studying the overlapping stages of genocide and by considering what power they, as citizens, have to prevent such a crime from occurring.
First, students contextualized the Holocaust in their history class. This prepared them to read the primary source E/96: Fate Undecided in their French class along with excerpts and other texts carefully selected from a variety of genres, such as graphic novel, fable, film and novel. This interdisciplinary learning spanned eight weeks and concluded with a presentation given by each student in their French class. Students used a reading response journal to log the course of their reading. They were asked to reflect on how their knowledge of the different steps of the genocidal process improved their understanding of, for example, the way in which Paul-Henri and his family tried to resist during the Holocaust. They were then asked to answer a synthesis question designed to help them share their reading experience in a more personal way.
The following section will discuss the presentation given by a student named Aglaée, who responded to one of the prompts with a drawing. Aglaée chose to answer the following question: “In a more personal form (for example, an image, drawing, quote, poem, music, diagram), share what you retained from the story and what you learned through your reading.” Each presentation was followed by discussion in small groups, which provided an outlet for feedback on the form and content of the presentation. It is important to note that the experiment took place at a private school where class sizes rarely exceed twenty students. Furthermore, I was instructing the Grade 11 French class, which undoubtedly influenced how the activity unfolded.
Aglaée’s Personal Reflection: Gathered under a Roof That’s Caving In
The following sections will reflect on a few passages from Aglaée’s reading response journal. This journal was intended as a creative and reflective space in which students were encouraged to note down their first impressions, their questions and their thoughts while reading the memoir. The illustration below, drawn by Aglaée, is an example of what she learned during these weeks dedicated to an interdisciplinary history/French approach to studying the Holocaust.
Aglaée’s illustration, Réunis sous un toit qui s’effondra (Gathered under a Roof That’s Caving In), expresses, on the one hand, what remains for Paul-Henri at the end of his account and the importance of relationships for survival, and, on the other, all the uncertainty that she felt as a reader. She chose to draw the faces based on the photos included at the end of the book. This choice demonstrates her attempt to, in her own way, humanize the history of the Holocaust and to give each victim their “life” back:
There’s his parents, his grandma, the Senegalese person, his sister.... They’re positioned symbolically since each is placed as if they were hovering over Paul-Henri. What I mean by this is that they helped him throughout his life and will be with him until the end.... [I] wanted to differentiate the two children, especially by their facial expressions. This highlights how their age difference impacts how they reacted to their situation. (Aglaée’s reading response journal, 2023)
According to Aglaée, Paul-Henri’s memoir stood out from the other documents studied in her history class because of how it contextualized the war through the emotions and thoughts of a young Jewish boy, rather than by way of facts and statistics. This illustrates what can be gained from studying the Holocaust at the human level, even if it can be observed and analyzed at the territorial and political levels as well.
[My f]avourite moment is when the Jews were making up satirical sketches, which gives us access to a kind of humanity that we don’t often see in our History courses. This passage brings us closer to the people of this era: the way they can laugh in their situation is a human quality that transcends all the time that’s passed since then. (Aglaée’s reading response journal, 2023)
The letters drawn by Aglaée represent the letters thrown from trains during deportations. Aglaée chose to highlight the importance of trains as a significant symbol of death in the collective imagination of this historic event:
The train symbolizes the family’s constant movement and uncertainty. Not only that, but the train is associated with the era when the Holocaust and its atrocities took place, since it was used to transport a number of Jews to their death in the concentration camps. (Aglaée’s reading response journal, 2023)
Paul-Henri’s account thus enabled Aglaée to consider the reality of the train convoys and ask herself what “choices” were available to Paul-Henri and his family. Finally, her drawing of the sandcastle is a reference to the beginning of the story, when a carefree Paul-Henri was playing in the sand. For Aglaée, this passage illustrates the naïveté of childhood in the face of war. She explains, moreover, that her choice to put the sandcastle on the rails was deliberate: “This symbolizes how his innocence was smashed by [the train]” (Aglaée’s reading response journal, 2023). The evocative force of the term “smashed” is noteworthy; its violence underscores the experiences of 1.5 million Jewish children who had to deny their identities, learn to lie in order to survive and go as far as to forget how to feel just to have the right to exist.
Aglaée leveraged these elements to discuss her reading experience, injecting her drawing with both personal form and structural substance. Her drawing not only served as a visual aid but also provided a new way for her peers to interpret the text and elaborate on it through class discussion and reflection.
For Aglaée, E/96: Fate Undecided is the story of a young boy and his family who survived thanks to human kindness, which was not the case for nearly 1.5 million Jewish children in this dark period of our past. This story can hardly be reduced to a number, even if this number speaks to the ideology and process behind this genocide. Becoming immersed in Paul-Henri’s words and testimony is an opportunity to open the dialogue around what distinguishes literature and history, how to speak about the unspeakable, the diversity of individual journeys and the legitimacy of co-existing, differing accounts.
In conclusion, this activity offers exciting avenues for using Holocaust memoirs to develop students’ reading skills, cultivate empathy and expand their awareness of different manifestations of racism. Thus, an interdisciplinary French/history approach appears to have tremendous potential to enrich students’ critical thinking and civic development through reading Holocaust memoirs.
I wish to thank Aglaée for kindly agreeing to share part of her work. The excerpts from her reading response journal were not corrected.
References:
Bélanger, Audrey. 2023. “Cultiver l’empathie des élèves et leur désir de mieux comprendre diverses manifestations du racisme à travers un récit mémoriel : l’exemple de matricule E96.” Les Cahiers de l’AQPF 14 (3): 52–56.
Bélanger, Audrey. 2022. “La lecture littéraire et la pensée historienne dans une dynamique integrative : recherche design en éducation autour d’un roman historique évoquant l’Holocauste.” PhD diss., Université de Sherbrooke.
Endacott, Jason L., and Sarah Brooks. 2018. “Historical Empathy: Perspectives and Responding to the Past.” In The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning, edited by Scott Alan Metzger and Lauren McArthur Harris, 203-226. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119100812.ch8
Hirsch, Sivane, and Sabrina Moisan. 2022. “Enseigner les genocides : Guide de soutien aux enseignants.” Ministère de education et de l’Enseignement Supérieur. https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec....