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These reflections from the coalface of teaching opened the door for Mia and\u00a0I to think together about the changing expectations audiences bring to survivors, the rise of interest in survivors, the challenges of listening to testimony, and the aim of being in conversation with survivors as persons whose life extends beyond the years of the Holocaust. Hank Greenspan’s work\u00a0On Listening to Holocaust Survivors<\/em> which explores the challenges of listening was the basis of our presentation. Oscillating between the valorisation of survivors as heroes and the understanding that survivors represent\u00a0our greatest fears and anxieties, we considered ways of ‘humanising’ or ‘normalising’ survivors, so that we are able to relate to their whole life story.<\/p>\nOur discussion concluded with a consideration of four\u00a0different\u00a0formats of accessing survivor narratives each gaining public attention at a different time:<\/p>\n
Hannah Bloch Kohner’s appearance on\u00a0This is your life<\/a><\/em> in 1953 brought an encounter with a Holocaust survivor to a mass audience via an entertainment chat show.<\/p>\n The 1980s saw choreographed Holocaust testimony gathered for educational reasons and as a collection of oral history resources.<\/p>\n Closer to home and closer in time, the video testimony of Dorrith Sim forged a connection to the Scottish context in which the\u00a0workshop attendees work. There was a desire for more local resources for teaching, particularly if these could be made available within the SJAC.<\/p>\n Finally, we broached the question of the\u00a0future of testimony at a time when the last survivors are dying. The\u00a0Forever Project<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>seeks to make the interactive nature of hearing a survivor speak accessible to future\u00a0generations through 3D imaging technology. The discussion following the introduction of this project was lively and minds were split as to whether a ‘3D survivor’ is a helpful educational tool or whether this attempt at keeping ‘live’ representations of survivors present is manipulating\u00a0and thereby perhaps more likely to close down learning opportunities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Hannah Holtschneider On 4 April, Mia and I\u00a0offered a session on the use of survivor testimony in the classroom at a teacher training event run by the Holocaust Educational Trust at the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre. We were lucky … Continue reading