The Educational Philosophy of Yad Vashem

Abstract

The Holocaust is usually presented by the traditional way of histori- cal research, analyzing different kinds of written documents, testimonies and pictures, in order to have a better understanding of the historical pro- cess of the “Final Solution”. This kind of presentation gives a comprehensible picture of politi- cal decisions, which were made by the perpetrators, but the image of the Jewish victim remain unclear in the shadow of the ashes of the gas cham- bers. The Jew has no face, no past, no family, he is no more than a helpless subject of the Nazi policy, part of a huge mountain of burned skeletons, a mathematical sum up of 6 million losses. This way of presentation streng- thens the Nazis’ perception of the Jews, which smashes not only his body but his memory too, since nobody can feel a real empathy for numbers. The immediate reaction to those traumatic horrible pictures is rejection or de- nial. This point of view leads to a claim of inability to understand the Holoc- aust as part of the historical phenomena, and to describe Hitler as an insa- ne, a sick one! This approach is especially dangerous, since it liberates the perpetrators from responsibility.