Holocaust Literature and Remembrance
Studying the Recollections and Testimonies of Survival
Never Forget: Narratives of the Holocaust
Understanding the scale of the Nazi genocide can be difficult. How does one put names and faces to the six millions Jews who were murdered? As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains, no single source can convey the devastation. "Calculating the numbers of individuals who were killed as the result of Nazi policies is a difficult task. There is no single wartime document created by Nazi officials that spells out how many people were killed in the Holocaust or World War II."
For this reason among others, it's important to study the narratives from witnesses and survivors. Though we can never hope to take in the full scope of the Nazi atrocities, we can learn stories of tragecy and survial that defined this moment in history, and then learn to identify and prevent such crimes in the future.
Course Structure
This course is divided into sections that focus on individual survivor testimonies as well as selected media portrayals. In teaching the Holocaust, it's tempting to provide the most striking narratives, the ones that feel the most unbelievable because the Nazi atrocities truly were unbelievable in scope and cruelty. However, it's important that the narratives we share are true. It's important that we don't allow the myths of the Holocaust to degrade our memory of the reality of what happened.
Following the recommendation from Luke Berryman's article, the majority of sources are narratives by witnesses and survivors — materials that are centered on factual observation rather than imaginative interpretation. For the few works of fiction or dramatization, the works are chosen because they accurately represent very specific events surrounding the Holocaust.
Recommended Resource:
Denial
Focus
Assignment
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Night by Eli Wiesel
Blessed Is the Match
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
Conspiracy
Recommended Resources: Teaching Holocaust Literature
"Teaching About the Holocaust in English Classrooms"
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In this video, USHMM educators discuss ways to responsibly teach the Holocaust in language arts classrooms.