In view of the globally rising antisemitism, Amsterdam Publishers and renowned Holocaust scholar Dr Joanna Michlic, are exploring ideas about an online educational project wherein Holocaust survivor memoirs are used as an essential educational tool for engagement with students from grade 8 (age 13) up to the college.
Although we now have hologram-like projections of survivors created by the USC Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles, we believe that written testimonies are still central for the memorialization and remembrance of Holocaust survivors and education against antisemitism. In spite of the limitations of the written testimonies, they can offer us both a tangible and visceral access to the world of thinking, feeling and being of the child survivors, at different stages of their lives, in a way that the hologram-projectors figures cannot do.
Not only do the testimonies add crucial emotional memory to the history of child survivors, but they also illuminate contingencies that other official documents do not provide. They sometimes shed light on daily experiences during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust that otherwise would be lost to us. They illuminate the specific ways in which children recall their childhoods and reveal how child survivors experience and retell wartime and postwar reality at different stages of their lives.
These testimonies are the chief and precious vehicle for the Holocaust memory and can serve as a powerful and meaningful tool in the education of young people who could sympathize with the wartime and early postwar fates of young survivors of the Holocaust. The memoirs offer an important way to learn about the pivotal events that define the 20th century and can help create a more tolerant society and foster global responsibility and social justice.
The testimonies also illuminate the long shadow of the Holocaust on survivors and their multigenerational families, their children and their grandchildren. It is therefore that Amsterdam Publishers has a growing library of Holocaust biographies written by 2nd gen and 3rd gen survivors. Those books will also be used in our educational project to reveal the long shadow of the Holocaust and the meanings of the past genocide in the lives of children and grandchildren of the survivors.
This project is informed by our professional interest, a serious commitment to the publication of memoirs and books about Holocaust survivors, and a long-standing commitment to researching and teaching about child Holocaust survivors by Dr Joanna B. Michlic.
The online creative educational program will focus on an active learning process through the vehicle of Holocaust books released by Amsterdam Publishers, and is interlinked with other multimedia tools such as online documentary films, interactive maps, photographs, and recorded interviews. We will collaborate with other specialists in the field. Students will be asked to explore one of the memoirs in the series Holocaust Survivor Memoir World War II (available on Amazon) and “follow in the footsteps” of the survivor by examining the place of birth, the local pre-war Jewish community and interethnic relations within the community on local and national levels, pre-war childhood activities, plays and schooling, wartime experiences and the daily struggle for survival of the child survivor in question, the early post-war recovery, including dreams, hopes and shattered dreams and expectations, and later post-war transnational life’s trajectories. We will offer online series of mini-lectures provided by Dr Michlic, examining particular broad historical issues such as pre-war antisemitism, rise of fascism, Jewish family before the Holocaust, the youth before, during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the reconstruction of Jewish family in the post-1945 era with related trauma.
We will co-develop working relationships individually with particular schools and groups of students and will work closely with a specific community / network. We will collaborate with other organisations / individuals with a close connection to the subject matter and develop working relations with Yad Vashem, USHMM, the Polin Museum in Warsaw and Holocaust Educational Trust among others, and with leading individual scholars in the field of the Holocaust.
Please note that this project is currently on hold since we are experiencing a flood of manuscripts with Holocaust memoirs coming our way. Since this is our core business we will focus on publishing first.