1-5 December 2008

Polish-German teachers’ workshop at the Auschwitz International Youth Meeting Centre

From 1 to 5 December the International Auschwitz Committee jointly organized a Polish-German teachers’ workshop at the Auschwitz International Youth Meeting Centre together with the University of Leipzig, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Berlin organization ‘Against Forgetting – For Democracy’ and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. The discussion entitled ‘Documents of the Holocaust in Research and Education’ focused especially on the accounts of surviving Jewish children: immediately after the end of the war representatives of the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland carried out interviews with surviving children. The witness accounts of the girls and boys are still strongly influenced by the impact of events. Their testimonies are vivid and direct, and recount their experiences of humiliation, fear and persecution. They tell of courageous rescues and of refusals to help. Only a few children survived the Holocaust.

The children’s testimonies have been published in an excellently edited volume by the Metropol Verlag in Berlin under the title ‘Kinder über den Holocaust’ (children’s accounts of the Holocaust).

A theatre play based on the children’s testimonies will be developed in a project resulting for this seminar.

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