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Are Trips to Auschwitz the Panacea for a History Sick Society? A Case Study of Holocaust Teaching: the Italian Memorial Trains to Auschwitz

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Fontana L.
Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne
|
2016
|
issue 6 "The Holocaust and the Contemporary World"
93-106
EN
My paper will focus on the Italian memorial trains to Auschwitz, which have become a very popular phenomenon, still unparalleled in Europe. Namely, I will argue that they are an example of deterioration of Holocaust teaching by analyzing the three key following aspects: 1) Is the primary goal of this initiative teaching history or promoting moral education? Believing that a site visit is enough to generate a meaningful civilizing impact on the visitors means trivializing Auschwitz. On the one hand, the preparatory work for a trip there cannot include the teaching of the Holocaust in its full complexity. On the other hand, any content selection will obviously influence the students’ historical perception. 2) Both pedagogy and methodology would need more accuracy because most teachers taking part in these projects tend to have a passive attitude arising from their choice to leave their educational responsibility in the hands of the organizers, therefore renouncing to coordinate by themselves the learning process of their students. 3) The use of an unsuitable language not only results from a lack of precision in defining the historical facts (mixing of political deportation, forced labour and extermination of the Jews) but also leads to a universally moralizing effect of the Holocaust. In particular, the use of a too general vocabulary (including terms like: human beings, victims, innocent people) risks overlooking and minimizing the specificity of the genocide. Such a language prevents students from understanding that the Holocaust victims were the Jews and that they were murdered just because they were born Jews. Given the great success of the memorial trains initiative and its strong connection with the teaching of history, it is essential to consider how teachers respond to the major challenge they are faced with: combining good history teaching with the moral lesson of Auschwitz.
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