Holocaust education is a core task of social education, linking historical understanding with empathy, moral judgment, and democratic citizenship. This theoretical article examines children's and YA Holocaust literature as a medium of social education. Drawing on social pedagogy, critical pedagogy, intercultural and citizenship education, difficult knowledge, and moral emotions, it develops a multidimensional framework with cognitive-historical, emotional-empathic, ethical-normative, critical-political, and resilience-related dimensions. Illustrative readings of Rose Blanche, Number the Stars, and Maus show how such texts require historically specific, trauma-aware, and critically dialogic pedagogical framing.
Based on oral history testimonies and archival documents, the article explores Holocaust memory in Kharkiv through monuments, memorial plaques, and the Memorial Complex in Drobytskyi Yar amid Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine. It analyzes how wartime reshapes the perception of memorial sites and transforms material objects into elements of living memory. Drawing on interviews with activists, survivors, residents, and students, the study highlights changing attitudes toward Holocaust remembrance and education. It also examines alternative forms of preserving memory under wartime conditions, including digital platforms, multimedia archives, and graphic narratives that combine oral testimonies with visual representation.
After WWII, Italy struggled to support a growing number of refugees as it grappled with its own reconstruction. This article examines problems Jewish Holocaust survivors faced in Italian Displaced Persons Camps. Focused on issues around material goods and transit times, it demonstrates that Jewish refugees sought to reclaim their own agency by organizing for better treatment in Italy and pushing for emigration, creating tensions between survivors and aid organizations. It argues that these issues were not only a matter of physical survival but also of symbolic importance as refugees fought to find their place in the postwar world.
This article examines holographic Holocaust survivor testimony through the interactive biography of Renee Firestone at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. As living witnesses diminish, museums adopt the Dimensions in Testimony project, raising questions about authenticity and engagement. Reflecting on encounter with Firestone's hologram, I argue that visitors' treatment of Firestone as a 'real' person obscures dynamics of objectification and spectatorship. Drawing on disability studies, the article shows how holographic displays risk turning survivors into spectacle and reinscribing the Jewish body as a 'Other'. Centering a disability perspective, I interrogate how these technologies shape knowledge, empathy, and display ethics.
After forty years of concealing his sexuality and his harrowing experiences in an internment camp, Pierre Seel, one of the 210 gay Frenchmen deported during the Second World War, relinquished his anonymity. Through an examination of his memoir, Moi, Pierre Seel, d & eacute;port & eacute; homosexuel, this article explores the narrative strategies employed to reclaim lost identities. An 'urgent appeal to witnesses and historians,' (Seel, Liberation was for Others, XI) Seel ' s testimony becomes a broader call for the recognition of queer victims of Nazi persecution. The article highlights the enduring power of storytelling in rescuing marginalized voices from historical erasure and in restoring the identity and dignity of those long denied acknowledgment.
Holocaust distortion is a threat to Holocaust sites today. How does this manifest in practice, and can we always distinguish between those who operate in good faith on the one hand, and bad actors on the other? This paper explores its impact at European case studies of mass graves. The paper has three overall aims: first, to explore Holocaust distortion in Europe today; second, to discuss how Holocaust distortion impacts mass graves in particular, creating 'Schr & ouml;dinger's mass graves.' Third, this paper questions the motives of 'good faith' actors, who reveal themselves as quite the opposite through their actions towards experts.
Many Jews documented their lives under Nazi terror, flight and exile in ego-documents, such as letters, diaries, and private photographs. These sources not only record experiences: many were also gestures of defiance against exclusion, persecution, and racial stereotyping. Most existing studies of such sources are based on particularly rich family archives. But well-rounded collections are rare. More typically, private papers of Holocaust victims and refugees survive in fragments: a single photo album, or a handful of letters, with little information about their provenance or use. This article explores how we can make sense of such orphaned fragments, and in particular, the importance of photographs in them. We do so by exploring three case studies from archives in Germany, Austria and the UK, which contain photographic fragments. To make sense of them, we suggest that comparisons, or serial iconography, allow us to draw inferences, detecting strategies familiar from fuller archives in fragmentary sources. We also argue that the theme of the fragment itself is an important part of Holocaust testimony, and can be used as a powerful commentary on absences, which form the real core of many Jewish families' experiences in the era of the Holocaust.
This special issue surveys the current state of the field of research on personal documents and ephemera in Holocaust scholarship. The introduction sets the scene with an overview of the field, taking stock, and then introduces the articles that follow. The contributions reflect on methodological issues and engage distinctive sources, working across disciplines and in dialogue with each other. The special issue draws attention to the insights that can be gleaned from multi-disciplinary scholarship and sets directions for further inquiry into the experiences of Holocaust victims.
This essay examines how Anouar Benmalek's Fils du Sh & eacute;ol (2015) writes the history and memory of the Herero Genocide (1904-1908) into the story of the Holocaust. The novel follows one Jewish family back through time, beginning with the protagonist's death in the gas chamber and ending forty years previously in the Shark Island concentration camp. In placing representations of the gas chamber alongside representations of the Herero Genocide, Benmalek's novel acknowledges the key role that the Holocaust plays in discussions of genocidal violence and situates it within a longer lineage of twentieth-century state-sponsored systematic mass murder.
Photography was strictly regulated in concentration camps, and usually, only SS photographers were allowed to take pictures. However, an exceptional case from Auschwitz is documented in which prisoners were allowed to design pictures within the SS photo studio. The uniqueness of this case sheds lights on the practices of photography controlled by the perpetrators, and the implications for the usage of their visual documentation today. I analyze these photographs according to a method I coined 'integrated visual history,' reading them within their context of origin to turn ostensible unspectacular wedding photos into historical sources for defiance and expressions of agency.
The Channel Islands were occupied by German forces in the early summer of 1940. Unlike Guernsey and Jersey, the population of Alderney had almost wholly evacuated to the UK. This left the island empty for German forces to commit atrocities upon thousands of forced laborers brought from across Europe to build the Atlantic Wall. Among them were those from Guernsey and Jersey who volunteered or were conscripted to work in Alderney, and who later gave testimonies to war crimes investigators. How much did Islanders witness, and what was their experience over five years of occupation? This paper assesses their perspective.
