Holocaust

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I think for me, when I'm thinking about this as an educator, the starting point is always: well, what is it that I want to achieve? What is the learning outcome for this? Is it that I want to challenge particular misconceptions that people might have about Jewish people? Is it to do with completely different things? And then I would encourage educators to think about it in that way, such that they can enter the classroom with an informed choice about how they might want to represent people by way of images. And particularly with respect to pre-war Jewish life, I noticed that there was a really big emphasis on that in the gallery. We’re in the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum in London.What we’re looking at here is a concrete tile that has recently gone on display. It’s a small object that tells one part of the devastating history of the Holocaust. Kristallnacht is instead referred to as “the November pogrom”, Mr Bulgin stressing the importance of conveying that it was about more than shattered windows and the destruction of synagogues. The perpetrators are also treated differently. As time has gone on, survivors and their relatives have become more willing to accept the presence of key Nazi leaders on the exhibition floor; their roles in the atrocity are explained on lifesize cut-outs that meet visitors at eye level, reinforcing the message that those who carried out the genocide were ordinary, unremarkable people. James Bulgin tells an important story that highlights how, to many people, the above placenames might sound unfamiliar, as Auschwitz fills Holocaust consciousness for the sheer scale of its horror ( Hitler didn’t build the path to the Holocaust alone – ordinary people were active participants, 27 January). But in truth, all sense of scale is lost when imagining the implications of the Nazis’ genocidal politics, while the human psyche is overwhelmed by the implication of such murderous intent to humanity itself. More importantly, he correctly emphasises that evil can, under particular circumstances, look very much like any one of us. This is, as Hannah Arendt describes, the sheer “banality of evil”.

Imperial War Museum galleries show where innocence ended New Imperial War Museum galleries show where innocence ended

I think that we've done something similar with the V1, for example. So, we have a V1 flying bomb that that's held in sort of stasis between our galleries and the Second World War Galleries below, and we did that because we know that a lot of visitors, maybe not some of the younger students but certainly a lot of our visitors, will be familiar with the V1 in the guise of the doodlebug - you know, part of Britain's homefront experience of having doodlebugs dropping from the sky. Not many of our visitors will know that these are also an object that emanated from the Holocaust; these things were made in factories by underground workers living in appalling conditions, and so actually something which seems a really sort of central and integral part of Britain's war narrative in the public consciousness is also part of a Holocaust narrative. And so by drawing those two things together as well, we're not talking about, you know, the detail of the way that these things were made, or the mechanics or the engineering or any of those things, but we're just trying to open a door into something so that people can appreciate this whole chapter, this whole dimension, and hopefully maybe think about that themselves too. JB] Yeah I mean, when we started on this project we had huge lists of objects that we wanted to use, and a huge list of photos and films, and we had to make decisions about what to use and what not to use. And obviously those decisions were informed by conversations with experts in in this country and in various different institutions across the world, but also by our, kind of, our own, you know, knowledge and experience and expertise. But I think it is really important to engage with the fact that we had to edit the narrative, and that means that the version of this history that we present in these galleries is, I would like to believe and I do profoundly believe, authoritative insofar as it's been informed by a large volume of experts and a huge amount of reading and research. And I think the idea that history is this huge kind of volatile, dynamic mass of information which is constructed on images, and accounts, and archives, and different sources, and different types of sources. And each one of us, as we engage with it, is just finding a different path through it. It is, you know, I think, in its own way, kind of really energizing and I think, I would hope that's something which teachers can find to kind of inspire students as they engage with, not just this subject but for all of history really.

New Imperial War Museum galleries show where innocence ended and Shoah horror began

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Holocaust | Imperial War Museums A personal story from the Holocaust | Imperial War Museums

Announcements placed in the personal columns of The Times under “married couples and manservants” included: “Couple, middle-aged, husband former higher clerk of a banking house, wife very good cook… refugees from Austria [still abroad], with excellent character, seek post.” Similarly actually, with things like the ‘Final Solution’: but what do we really mean when we say that? The ‘solution’ suggests a problem; there is no, there is no ‘Final Solution’ because- insofar as there was never a problem. It's impossible to have a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. But by us continually, sort of unproblematically referring to the ‘Final Solution’ to refer to mass murder of Europe's Jews, we’re somehow taking the Nazis at their own word. And that's not just an issue of kind of, you know, unproblematic use of language; that is a really big issue in terms of the way that we're really thinking about engaging with what we're talking about. Victoria Coren Mitchell gives birth! TV host, 51, welcomes second child with comedian husband David, 49, as proud parents confirm tot's sweet name The Holocaust did not happen simply because Hitler willed it into being, but because there were enough people prepared to act on his intentions and align themselves with his ideology. It was not implemented as part of a preconceived masterplan that had always anticipated death camps as the ultimate destination; it evolved. Jaya Carrier] So, one of the things that has come out of the focus group and the research that IWM have done is that teachers struggle to know what language to use in talking about this really complex and difficult history, and that's something that teachers are grappling with all the time. And I mean, I've been teaching for 11 years and it's something that I’m still really keen to make sure that I think really carefully about, and that I get right. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this with respect to teaching about the Holocaust.

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This is the ground the camps were figuratively built on. The fact that such a place – a mass grave of potentially tens of thousands – could exist, unmarked and unexplored in a modern European nation, is a profoundly disturbing thing. I believe, however, that it is something we need face up to. Through testimonies and artefacts, it would aim to take victims out of victimhood, Bulgin added, to see them as “people who were born, who were living their lives, and the interruption of those lives shouldn’t be the only thing that defines them”. Gena's daughter Bernice said her mother 'would be ecstatic' that the dress is going on display permanently, adding: 'When she was asked to have it at the museum, she thought it was unbelievable. She was incredibly proud that people would see it and realise that out of the horrors something wonderful happened.' Pictured: Gena in 2004

How the Holocaust Began, review: a chilling reminder that the

Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out many of these murders. But the chilling truth presented here was that they did not – in fact, could not – act alone. They needed not just the tacit support of the civilian population, but their active participation. It is crucial that we understand how the Holocaust was able to develop; blaming it all on the Nazis is to turn a blind eye to the darker side of human nature.”

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That’s not how it really was. Holocaust museums for years have been asking visitors: ‘Beware the Holocaust because you could have been a victim.’ I suppose we are thinking: ‘Beware the Holocaust because you could have been a perpetrator.’” One of the central principles of the new exhibition is its emphasis on “the fact that it happened in our world and we walk among its remnants,” says Bulgin. “The people who did these things were very much like you or me.” The new galleries explore three core themes of persecution, looking at the global situation at the end of the First World War; escalation, identifying how violence towards Jewish people and communities developed through the 1930s; and annihilation, examining how Nazi policy crosses the threshold into wide-scale state-sponsored murder in the heart of twentieth century Europe. The BBC is to show three new documentaries this month to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.