“And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” wrote German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (“Beyond Good and Evil”).
For Jews, no abyss is deeper and darker than the German Nazis’ attempted genocide of the Jews of Europe in the early 1940s. Most of us are probably content to contemplate it only once a year, at the observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, one of the newest additions to the Jewish calendar.
But what is it like to gaze into this abyss every year, even every day? Some people in our community have to do it, in fact make themselves do it, for they are teachers and scholars who devote time to studying this event and teaching about it.
The Chronicle spoke to three such people in Milwaukee. And indeed, they all report that to some extent the abyss gazes into them.
“I firmly believe that once you begin to engage this material, it traumatizes you,” Amy Shapiro, professor of philosophy at Alverno College, said in a telephone interview.
Shapiro teaches a general introduction to the history of the Holocaust every three semesters at Alverno, and teaches a Holocaust travel course that visits the sites every two years. She also has written articles about Holocaust pedagogy and every two years participates in the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium held at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire, Great Britain (the next will be held this June).
Shapiro said that the most difficult aspects of doing this work varies for her from semester to semester; but in general “the most difficult thing is dealing with survivor accounts,” whether reading them, seeing filmed interviews or hearing survivors speak.
“You’ve got the history and the pain and suffering written in their faces,” Shapiro said. “I think that’s probably the most compelling and most painful.”
Sense of responsibility
Yet for Shapiro, “In a way, teaching is a way to deal with that trauma,” she said. “It helps one manage one’s own pain in dealing with it.”
And Shapiro reports that the effect on her students also “helps one deal with the pain of having to engage the material.”
“There’s a kind of emotional dimension that’s part of the learning and a powerful moral sensibility that they take away from the experience of studying it,” she said. “There is just so much gratitude people express.”
Perhaps above all, “I feel it’s a responsibility I have” to teach the subject, she said. “I feel as though I’m a witness, that once you learn and study the Holocaust, you become a witness to the accounting of it.”
A sense of responsibility also sustains Laurie Herman, who for the past five years has taught a nine-week class on the Holocaust to the eighth grade at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School.
“It’s a challenge every year,” she said in a telephone interview. “Emotionally I get very involved,” to the point that she sometimes has nightmares or gets “choked up” in class.
Yet “it’s so important to me that this knowledge not be lost in the future that I just do it,” Herman said. “I keep in mind when I’m teaching that these kids are the future,” and that they will “value Judaism more” and learn about moral behavior.
“I cope with it by keeping the goal in mind,” said Herman.
Moreover, she feels that she is rewarded every year when the students write essays at the end of the class.
“When I read what they’ve written, I’m so proud of the kids,” Herman said.
Rachel Baum also recalls having had nightmares after reading Holocaust materials in preparing for her doctoral dissertation.
She is now a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Foreign Languages and Linguistics Department. She teaches a class “every semester” on “Representing the Holocaust in Words and Images,” and sometimes adds to that a class on Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust.
And she told The Chronicle in a telephone interview that she warns her students “not to read the material at night” before going to sleep. Even so, she said some of her students report nightmares, while others have “just feelings of sadness.”
For herself, Baum acknowledged that the material is “emotionally demanding” and that “I worry about my own burnout.” She also said she is torn between the need to develop “a thick skin in order to function” and the desire to “be vulnerable to” the material.
To cope with this, Baum said, people “need to find something to balance all the tragedy.”
For herself, “when not teaching, I avoid Holocaust material,” and she focuses on “light reading and films” and “being with my family,” which she said is “central to my sanity.”
In fact, some of her students have learned to “throw themselves into what’s wonderful about their lives,” thereby absorbing what she calls “one of the other lessons of the Holocaust, that life is such a precious gift and we should enjoy it.”
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