How do germans teach the holocaust

For example, here you will never encounter a German class that does not know about Kristallnacht. Almost every school in Germany where I have worked has a project related to the Holocaust. The topic of the Holocaust appears in almost all areas of study. When one seeks to answer the question of what the Germans learn about the Holocaust in , one must first ask: Who are the Germans? A few years ago, Zarfati accompanied a group of teenagers from several German schools on a special trip in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and Jewish immigrants.

They traveled from Berlin to Paris by bus, continued on to Marseilles and the Pyrenees and returned to Germany via Spain. At the end of the trip, the pupils shared their experiences and their impressions with the class. The people at Yad Vashem are very familiar with Holocaust education in Germany.

She has been in schools where the Holocaust is taught as a national story of Germany alone. But how will Muslim pupils who come from immigrant backgrounds respond to that?

The curriculum includes lessons about people recognized as Righteous among the Nations who were Muslim or complex and unique figures such as Gad Beck, a Jewish underground fighter and gay man who lived in Berlin.

In the group were Palestinian pupils living in Berlin. The staff from Yad Vashem told them the story of Refik Veseli, a year-old Muslim from Albania, who rescued a Jewish family during the Holocaust and was recognized as one of the Righteous among the Nations.

The Muslim pupils in Berlin were greatly moved. Their request was granted earlier this year, and the school is now named for Refik Veseli. Back to Professor Greif. Last fall, we were together in Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf and many small towns. Over the past 13 years, since he began lecturing to German pupils, he has appeared before , people. I would be glad to lecture to all of them about the Holocaust. Greif, 63, was born and raised in Tel Aviv to a family who emigrated from Germany.

As a young man he was a singer and musician who had a few hits on the radio hit parades. Later on, when he was searching for some more content in his life, he began to study history. He earned his doctorate from the University of Vienna, and became a professor at the University of Texas in Austin. Since then, he has worked as a historian, researcher, lecturer and editor for many institutions including the Knesset, Yad Vashem and universities in Israel and abroad. His book, We Wept Without Tears — the first work to bring to light the testimony of the members of the Jewish Sonderkommando units at Auschwitz — was translated into six languages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

In the city of Essen, he spoke before the pupils of a prestigious high school. The pupils were impeccably dressed, almost all of them the sons of German families; there were no immigrant children there. Without a pause, Greif began projecting photographs of the Auschwitz crematoria buildings.

They listened in silence as he spoke about corpses, cremation and gas. The room was quiet throughout the lecture. No pupil played with his cellular telephone. On the other hand, we have no right to obscure or censor the truth. They want to listen to someone who can show and tell them about Hitler in an accessible way. Germany has more than 2, memorial sites, including Wannsee, noting the Nazi-committed horrors that killed 6 million Jews and millions of others during World War II, according to the Berlin-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

It's an exemplar in its openness for dealing with its difficult and conflicted past," said John Lennon, a professor at Glasgow University whose research focuses on people attracted to sites of mass killing, genocide and assassinations. There is also almost an obsession with documentation and evidence. A recent debate centered on a scholarly annotated version of Mein Kampf , Hitler's manifesto published in that was banned in Germany for seven decades after World War II for fear it could be used as propaganda.

The book sold 85, copies last year, making it one of the best-selling non-fiction titles in Germany, according to its publisher, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.

The institute said the book has been bought by political and history buffs and educators, not "reactionaries or right-wing radicals. As the Nazi era recedes in time, Germans have been more willing to explore and question their own family history, said historian Oliver von Wrochem, who heads a research center that studies the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. Over the past five years, he said a small, but increasing number of people are asking him to help find more about what their relatives did during the war.

In Germany's case, it has taken quite a long time because of what we did, and on what scale we did it. But I don't think there's necessarily some huge demand in Germany for dealing with Hitler or the Nazis in the way I did," Vermes said.

A few things, Neiman said. She talked about the Stumbling Stones project, which a German artist began in , and which is now the largest decentralized monument in the world, with plaques all over Germany.

And thousands of people do this. Her final lesson was about balance. As a kid, you believe everything they tell you. As an adolescent, you may be inclined to reject everything. Not the other stuff. But to truly topple a bully from the top spot you have to address the toxic forces that got him there. By Lizzie Widdicombe. Five years after his landmark article, the writer discusses what forms reparations might take, and which Democratic candidates seem most serious about the issue.

By The New Yorker. Lizzie Widdicombe is a staff writer at The New Yorker. The New Yorker Recommends What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week.