4. In one of your books, Auschwitz Explained to My Child( 1999), you explain how the questions your daughter put to you were the same ones you asked yourself, but in other terms, questions that endeavour to explain how the Jewish genocide was possible. The world of education does the vital job of passing on the history and memory of the Shoah to new generations. In your opinion, what are the biggest difficulties these new generations face and what tools can they rely on to overcome them?
In this short book published in 1999, which is still used and has been translated into some twenty languages, I gave a history lesson intended for thirdyear students in conversational format. My daughter Mathilde gave her input; her rereading made it possible to elucidate what teenagers found difficult to understand. I also grouped together my students’
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4. Can we“ explain” to a child what remains, in part, enigmatic? How do you get a young girl to understand today that the Nazis spent so much energy going to the four corners of Europe and exterminating millions of men, women and children, simply because they were Jews? | Seuil, 1999 questions( I taught for twenty years in schools and secondary schools before joining the CNRS [ French National Centre for Scientific Research ]). Teachers today face the same challenges – teaching history – in very different situations. The first element is obviously the passage of time. Students will no longer touch the number tattooed on the forearm of an Auschwitz survivor. Young people today have grandparents born after the Second World War, and what it was is no longer passed on in families. Taking the case of France, in particular the Paris region, many students come from non-European geographical areas that were not affected by the Second World War, or barely so. Lastly, the virtuous years, those that go from the fall of communism to the attack on the Twin Towers are behind us. In those years, the idea of a worldwide victory of democracy and human rights was widespread and the teaching of the history of the Shoah was an
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5.“ We knew. The world had heard about it. But so far none of us had seen it. It’ s like we’ ve finally stepped inside the very folds of this evil heart.” | instrument. Since then, other subjects have come into the field of history and memory, notably slavery and colonisation, with a new lexicon( the emergence of words such as“ racialised”,“ decolonial”,“ cancel culture” and, just recently,“ woke”).
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