The distance of both time and place of the events of the Holocaust continues to be a challenge to modern-day New Zealand: a challenge which all personnel of the Holocaust Center rise to on a daily basis, reiterating the relevance of Holocaust education and of remembrance, when engaging with members of the local and wider community and also with secondary school pupils on educational visits.
With New Zealand being so remote a location it is sometimes a challenge for our students to understand the impact of the Holocaust on society. To overcome this challenge we encourage students to understand the individual stories from the Holocaust and thereby enable them to have people to relate to. Students are encouraged to discuss what are the lessons learned from the Holocaust and relate this to the present day and how they can apply what they learn to be better citizens, so an event like this may never happen again.
The importance of teaching about the Holocaust in NZ
We hear from people who seem to believe that the Holocaust was just about death, murder, genocide, but not about aspects like resistance, Righteous people, or the way that people tried to make life as normal as possible.
Teaching about the Holocaust is not mandatory in the NZ curriculum. Through our outreach and our program with Yad Vashem, however, we try to assist teachers to see the relevance and the ways to teach this topic; to focus away from the trauma but look at the individual stories; to see that people were strong in the face of death and destruction; that effective teaching needs to happen; and that graphic images of piles of bodies or statistics achieve little and may traumatize the students whilst individual stories sharing hope (whilst not always with a happy ending) familiarise the students to see the victims and survivors as real people, as human beings rather than numbers.
Antisemitism and Holocaust denial are more visible every day as people appear to feel that it is okay to question facts. 'Fake news' has meant that people feel they can look at historical events and say they didn’t really happen.
the Warsaw Uprising Commemoration in collaboration with
the Embassy of Poland in Wellington