I grew up in London in a non-Jewish area and I went to a non-Jewish girls’ grammar school. No one ever spoke about the Holocaust in the 1950s; I learned about it from reading the reports of the Eichmann trial in 1961, and I was so angry.
I began to study and teach it in the mid 1980s. I was lucky to have great mentors: the late Hyam Maccoby and Robert Wistrich, both of whom displayed humanity in the face of appalling truth. I worked and taught in Hampstead, the meeting place and home of many of the surviving émigrés from Europe, who tended to gravitate to the Cosmo restaurant on the Finchley Road, because it reminded them of their native lands. Then they came to the Spiro Institute, and later, the London Jewish Cultural Centre where I was CEO. And so I met survivors, partisans and genuine intellectuals. They were the remnants of a destroyed civilisation, and they were magnificent.
From 1988, I visited Poland every year with my colleague Jerry Gotel, who had first travelled to Eastern Europe in the late 1960s to honour the members of his family who had perished. We would drink in the Kazimierz district in Krakow, which was once the centre of Jewish life.
We gravitated to the Ariel Café, a Jewish-style restaurant where we would meet fellow travellers all searching for an understanding.
Our work in Poland grew because of Raphael “Felek” Scharf. He arrived in England in 1938 from Krakow to study at LSE. He was 24. His great-grandfather had been the rabbi of the town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz). After the war, he returned to Poland often; he still loved Polish culture. I once stood with Raphael in the Krakow town square on a searing hot day. A beautiful young woman walked towards us and Raphael began to cry. I asked him why. “Because,” he replied, “I have not seen a beautiful Jewish girl walk across the Rynek since before the war.”
Raphael introduced us to his friend Joachim Roussek, who had founded a Jewish cultural centre in Krakow. Roussek told us: “the Polish people need to discover their past for, with the death of the Jews, Poland lost its left arm.”
By the early 1990s Holocaust Studies was being taught throughout Europe. I was already training teachers in London. Raphael, through Roussek and others, arranged for us to begin training Polish teachers in Krakow. Jerry, myself and Shirley Murgraff, a woman who battled racism and antisemitism all her working life, began a series of trips to Poland.
We also worked in Belarus, again because of another extraordinary man: Jack Kagan. He was born in Novogrudek, a town that, before the war, was 50 per cent Jewish. I met Jack when I taught him modern Jewish history in Hampstead. After the Germans invaded in 1941, Jack, then a teenager, managed to escape the work camp where he was incarcerated with his father. He joined the Bielski, a Jewish partisan brigade that operated in the forests and thus survived the war. Almost his entire family were murdered.
Jack was determined that, in his hometown of Novogrudek, the residents would know what they had lost. He encouraged us to teach there and we did. Most of the teachers came from the villages around. I remember one female teacher particularly; when asked how she had taught the Holocaust thus far she replied, “I ask my students to write down their dreams for the future. I bring an urn into the classroom. When they have finished, I tell them to place the dreams in the urn, and I burn them.” We had nothing to teach her.
We believed then that, if we taught the Holocaust effectively, we would not only honour the dead but we would help prevent human beings lapsing into murderous violence. We learnt how powerful survivor testimony is as a teaching tool; and, as survivors reached the age when they had grandchildren, they were willing, often for the first time, to tell the stories they had been unable to tell their children, or which their children did not wish to hear. In 1991, Holocaust Studies became part of the National Curriculum; at last it was recognised by the British government as something essential to be taught.
At the same time, Holocaust themes were permeating into popular culture, most notably in Schindler’s List, which was seen by a quarter of the population of the UK. We welcomed this but, later, as the Holocaust became a cinematic plot device, or backdrop, or worse, was reconstructed inaccurately to divest people of responsibility, we abhorred it.
In 1998, the Swedes led an inter-governmental commission to discuss the implication of Holocaust education, research and remembrance.
Two years later — on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — 44 governmental representatives met in Stockholm and created the Stockholm Declaration. They declared their “commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past.” Holocaust Memorial Day was established; the first British commemoration was on 27th January 2001.
The International Task Force for Holocaust Education Research and Remembrance (now called IHRA — International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), which I joined at its inception, was designed to promote Holocaust education globally; in 2005, the UN embraced Holocaust Memorial Day. I believed then that the memory — and the possibility of taking something valuable from the catastrophe — was secure.
I believe that antisemitism is so deeply embedded in western culture that it will never be eradicated. But I know also we have touched people, particularly through survivor testimony. I watched an orphaned survivor tell her story.
A young boy — he was perhaps 13 — came to her and took her hand. The head of the school later told us that the child was recently bereaved; this was the first time he had expressed emotion about it. I could tell you many such stories.
I hoped that by teaching about the Holocaust — by showing people where, exactly, hating the other can lead — we could destroy some of the poisons in the soul. I know now that we can in some, but not others, and so, as the people of memory, we go on.
Trudy Gold is Director of Holocaust Studies at JW3
