HOL0060

Written evidence submitted by Professor Robert Jan van Pelt

University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Summary

• The Centre for Holocaust Education (CHE) at University College London has set a global standard for the use of artefacts in Holocaust education.
• No centre involved in Holocaust education anywhere can match the CHE achievements in this field.
• With the passing of the last generation of Holocaust survivors, the techniques developed by the CHE to make historical artefacts speak will become crucial in preserving the legacy of the survivors.

Who am I?

My name is Robert Jan van Pelt, and I am University Professor, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I have been involved in Holocaust research and Holocaust education since the mid 1980s, focusing on the German death camps, and have published twelve books in the field.

My work on the construction of Auschwitz was the focus of a BBC Horizon documentary (The Blueprint of Genocide, 1994), and I was senior consultant to the six-part BBC TV series on the camp (Auschwitz: In the Nazi State, 2005). In the year 2000,

I served as expert witness in the notorious Irving-Lipstadt case, fought in the High Court of England and Wales in London.

I have been involved in Canadian, American, Irish and Austrian Holocaust education, specially focusing on the education and training of high school teachers, since the mid 1990s. Since 2000, I conduct under auspices of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR) an annual two-week tour for American teachers through Germany and Poland, visiting Holocaust-related sites.

For the duration of its existence (2009-13), I was a member of Canada’s National Task Force on Holocaust Research, Remembrance and Education.

On the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London

1. Working and living in North America, I do not have had much opportunity to get to know the way the Holocaust is taught in British schools, or to observe its effectiveness. And I do not have a first-hand knowledge about the role of the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London in British Holocaust education. I have, however, had the privilege to see at various different occasions Paul Salmons, Programme Director of the CHE, at work in a workshop for teachers organized by the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland (HETI) at Trinity College Dublin.

2. I have had the pleasure to work with HETI in their teacher education programme, focusing on historiographic and forensic issues concerning the Holocaust, and their use and abuse (Holocaust denial!). Every time I conduct my seminars in Dublin, I ensure to make time to attend Salmons’ seminars on the use of historical artefacts in the classroom.

3. By means of an interrogation of historical artefacts, Salmons is able to transform seemingly ordinary objects, and many of them damaged, into magic doors that allow teachers and students to peek into an at first unimaginable world. Articulating and exploiting the aura of the artefact, Salmons develops within the participants first a desire and then the skill to read artefacts forensically, revealing increasingly complex layers embodied within the evidence at hand. In addition, through the artefacts, Salmons reveals the varieties of historical experience and moral decision. Finally he creates a sense of ownership over and responsibility for one of the most troubled parts of European history that, with the passing of the last survivors, might be left orphaned.

4. I know that Salmons’ approach and methods have become the hallmark of the CHE, and that there is no other Holocaust education institute in Britain, Europe or for that matter the world that can, in this field, match the achievements of the CHE.

November 2015