The Holocaust education we should give the next generation

As we mark Yom HaShoah, questions are being raised — loudly, publicly, and often by people far removed from the classroom — about whether Holocaust education has failed. I understand the impulse. The resurgence of antisemitism is bewildering, frightening, and enraging. But blaming Holocaust education for the persistence of anti-Jewish hatred is not only ill-founded — it misunderstands the scale of the problem and the nature of the solution.

Let’s be clear about what we are dealing with. Anti-Jewish hatred is a multi-millennial endemic epidemic, woven into the fabric of Western civilisation across four thousand years and a dozen genocides against the Jewish people. We are hardly going to resolve the underlying problem by providing ninth graders with three hours of instruction. Because people still have cancer, should we throw up our hands in despair and shut down the Wellcome Trust? No. We invest more. We go deeper. We never stop.

Critics often point to surveys showing young people cannot name Auschwitz, or state how many Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. I have a question for every reader of this newspaper: how many Japanese civilians died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many people perished in the bombing of Dresden? Can you quote those numbers without reaching for Google? I doubt it. Does that make you immoral? Anti-Japanese? Anti-German? Of course not. The inability to recall statistics provides insight into how well information is being imparted, but is not in itself a measure of anti-Jewish hate, or moral understanding.

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That said, we must remain self-aware as educators and evaluate what works. What Holocaust education has done is reach millions who would otherwise know nothing at all and 98% of British students do know what the Holocaust is. That is not failure. That is a foundation to build on.

And build we must — because I believe we do need to find different approaches.

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For too long, we have taught the Holocaust as the death of six million. Think about that framing. We start with six million dead Jews — exactly how the Nazis would want us to say it. It is the outcome of what they intended. We tell the story from outside in: their words, their timeline, their death camps, their cameras, their documents, their policies, their laws. We have, without meaning to, handed the narrative to the perpetrators.

What if instead we taught the Holocaust as the lived experience of nine million? Nine million Jewish people who lived every day under Nazi oppression – clothing their children, praying to their God, confused by the latest laws, battling for basic necessities. For twelve years, they had to keep living their lives in ever-changing, bewildering circumstances. What if we turned the Holocaust from being about dead Jews to living, loving people who held on to what it meant to be Jews, in spite of it all?

Every single one of those nine million had a face, a name, a home, people who loved them. They were intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, humorous, religious, secular, struggling human beings. How dare we reduce those beautiful souls to statistics of the Nazi death machine. I want to know who they were, not what they became.

Through my new project, Our Jewish Story, I recently learned about Rachela — the great-grandmother of Association of Jewish Refugees CEO Michael Newman. Rachela was a woman in her fifties, living in Nazi Germany. First, she lost her son —who disappeared after being deported to Poland as part of the Polenaktion in October 1938. Then her daughter fled to England on the last available boat, in August 1939. Then her husband was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Buchenwald, and murdered there.

This woman, Rachela, was completely alone. And yet — for many months — she found ways. Ways to survive, to protect whoever she could still reach, to outsmart the enemy, to keep going. Every single day, she was living. Every single day, she was fighting. Until eventually she was deported to the Lodz ghetto and finally murdered. Once you know Rachela by name— she changes how you understand the universe.

Holocaust education is about teaching the skill of empathy, because empathy is a skill, not an emotion. Empathy begins with the skill of listening: learning who the Jews were, the kind of lives they led, the kind of people they were. Then it moves to understanding their predicament as the Nazis closed in. Then to seeing the consequences for their descendants, and for all of us, today. Practised this way, empathy does not result in false sympathy but a deeper understanding of the human condition — of what happens when ordinary people stop seeing their neighbours as human.

If we want Holocaust education to be more effective, we need to invest in empathy training. We need educators like those I saw recently at the National Holocaust Museum in Laxton, sitting cross-legged on the floor with ten-year-olds, asking how ordinary children can be turned against their friends. We don’t need to measure how many know the number six million, we need to measure what questions they ask about the world they live in.

Holocaust education has not failed. Society has failed Holocaust education. The answer is not to retreat. It is to go deeper, to centre Jewish lives in the story, and to teach the young the most human of all skills — how to truly see another person.

Stephen D. Smith is co-founder of the National Holocaust Museum UK and Executive Director Emeritus of USC Shoah Foundation.