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‘But, apartheid was also genocide …What about our suffering?’ Teachingthe Holocaust in South Africa –opportunities and challengesTali Nates aa Johannesburg Holocaust Centre , South African HolocaustFoundation , Private Bag X6, Sandringham 2131, South AfricaPublished online: 21 May 2010.
To cite this article: Tali Nates (2010) ‘But, apartheid was also genocide … What about oursuffering?’ Teaching the Holocaust in South Africa – opportunities and challenges, InterculturalEducation, 21:S1, S17-S26, DOI: 10.1080/14675981003732183
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675981003732183
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Intercultural EducationVol. 21, Suppl. No. S1, 2010, S17–26
ISSN 1467-5986 print/ISSN 1469-8439 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14675981003732183http://www.informaworld.com
‘But, apartheid was also genocide … What about our suffering?’ Teaching the Holocaust in South Africa – opportunities and challenges
Tali Nates*
Johannesburg Holocaust Centre, South African Holocaust Foundation, Private Bag X6, Sandringham 2131, South AfricaTaylor and FrancisCEJI_A_473740.sgm10.1080/14675981003732183Intercultural Education1467-5986 (print)/1469-8439 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & [email protected]
Participants in South African educator workshops focusing on teaching theHolocaust and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda frequently declare that apartheid wasalso genocide. These comments seem like a cry to recognize that South Africa’spast of human-rights abuses and pain also deserves a definition, and genocideseems to be the desired title of ultimate suffering. How do you teach the Holocaustand use it as a tool to understand human rights and democracy in a countryrecovering from the legacy of apartheid? Is it possible to make connectionsbetween the Holocaust and current issues in South Africa, such as xenophobia?And what are the best practices with respect to teaching the Holocaust in a largeand diverse country, with 11 official languages and vastly different levels ofeducation?
Keywords: Holocaust; Holocaust education; human rights education; education inSouth Africa; apartheid
Introduction
Teaching about the Holocaust in South Africa is a complicated affair. How do youteach about atrocities and pain in a country that has its own heavy burden of immensemanmade suffering? The German writer Richard von Weizacker wrote:
It is not a matter of overcoming the past. One can do no such thing. The past does notallow itself to be retrospectively altered or undone. But whoever closes his eyes to thepast becomes blind to the present. Whoever does not wish to remember inhumanitybecomes susceptible to the dangers of new infection. (von Weizacker, cited in Berenbaum1993, 223)
He spoke of course about Germany as a nation and how ‘their forefathers havebequeathed them a heavy legacy’ (Berenbaum 1993, 222).
South Africa also bears a heavy legacy. The year 2010 marks 16 years since theend of the apartheid regime and the celebration of South Africa’s new democracy. TheSouth African painful past is always near and, to a large extent, it determines much ofhow the present and future are shaped. Suffering during apartheid does not necessarilymean that South Africans are now immune to becoming ‘susceptible to the dangers ofnew infection’; the xenophobic attacks of May 2008 were proof of that.
*Email: [email protected]
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This paper examines the opportunities and challenges that teaching the Holocaustand Holocaust-related themes in South Africa today have presented. The paperfocuses on three key questions: How do you teach the Holocaust as a tool to under-stand human rights and democracy today in a country recovering from the wounds ofapartheid? Is it possible to make connections between the Holocaust and current issuesin South Africa? Is it beneficial to use a different continent and country’s history tounderstand the country’s own reality and build its future?
In order to understand a number of the challenges and opportunities presented byteaching the Holocaust in South Africa, one needs to look briefly at the history ofapartheid education in the country. The apartheid government saw the educationsystem of South Africa as a key component in its efforts to create and maintain a racialstate. Like the rest of South African society, schooling was divided along racial lines.There were separate departments of education for all classified racial groups in thecountry. The quality of the education a student received and the resources the stateallotted to the student’s education were defined according to his or her classification.Students who were classified as ‘white’ benefited from First World resources, whilethe other groups, forming the majority of the population, received Third World facil-ities in overcrowded conditions taught by underqualified and poorly trained teachers.The content of the curriculum, which differed according to racial classification, wascarefully designed to encourage and perpetuate the divisions in society and tried todetermine the expectations and aspirations of students.
Following the first democratic election in South Africa in April 1994, one of thekey tasks confronting the government was to dismantle both 46 years of apartheideducation and the nearly 300 years of colonial education which had gone before. Thiswas an enormous challenge which was informed and underpinned by the New SouthAfrican Constitution and Bill of Rights (Act 108 of 1996).
The Holocaust is included in the curriculum! Opportunities created by teaching about the Holocaust in South Africa
In 2007, the Holocaust was included as part of the new national history curriculum ofthe country. South Africa is the only country in Africa that includes this module in itscurriculum, and this permits one to look at the opportunities that teaching the Holocaustcan bring to the country. When the new curriculum was decided upon, the Holocaustwas included in both the grades 9 and 11 social sciences and history curricula. TheNational Department of Education decided to implement a curriculum which empha-sizes the theme of human rights and is based on the Constitution and Bill of Rights ofSouth Africa. These documents were directly influenced by the Universal Declarationof Human Rights, which in turn came about as a result of the Second World War andthe Holocaust. Andre Keet of the South African Human Rights commission stated:
It is widely accepted that the events of the Holocaust represented one of the mostextreme human rights violations in the history of humankind. The lessons drawn fromthis crime against humanity played a defining role in the construction and developmentof contemporary human rights. Therefore and alongside the many historical and present-day human rights atrocities across the world and our continent, the inclusion of theHolocaust in the curriculum was never disputed. (Freedman 2008)
South Africa’s high school education runs from grade 8 to grade 12. Grades 8 and9 are the last two years of a phase starting at the primary school level in grade 4 called
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GET (General Education and Training). Grades 10–12 are called FET (Further Educa-tion and Training). Grade 9 is a possible exit year for learners,1 who are legallyallowed to leave the education system at that level. From Grade 10 on, learners arerequired to select fewer subject choices, and there is no guarantee that they will choosehistory. The curriculum designers purposely included the study of the Holocaust ingrade 9 so that all learners would have the opportunity to learn this section of history.From 2007, teachers were required to teach the Holocaust in all schools across thecountry. The Holocaust is the first part of the module ‘Human rights issues during andafter World War Two’. It is then followed by the study of apartheid. Through learningabout the Holocaust first and then apartheid, learners are better equipped to makeconnections to issues of our time such as the genocide in Rwanda and xenophobia inSouth Africa (also included in this grade’s curriculum).
The first Holocaust Centre in South Africa was established in Cape Town in 1999.Its establishment was prompted by an 18-month tour of South Africa and Namibia ofthe ‘Anne Frank in the World’ exhibition in 1993–94. For the first time in the coun-try’s history, a number of special panels about South Africa’s own history of HumanRights abuse were developed as part of the exhibition. The exhibition was attended bythousands of South Africans of all ages, but especially by high-school learners andtheir educators. The exhibition gave educators the opportunity to learn aboutantisemitism. This knowledge gave them a perspective that racism ‘was not onlydependent on skin colour and that even “white” people could be victims of stereotyp-ing, discrimination and persecution’ (Freedman 2008). The response of the educatorswas extraordinary. The Anne Frank exhibition showed the role that Holocaust educa-tion could play in post-apartheid South Africa in raising the issues of prejudice andabuse of power. In the context of the painful history of racism in South Africa, therealization that people classified as ‘white’ could also suffer, and at the hands of other‘whites’ no less, allowed for new learning processes and continues to do so.
In 2008, two new Holocaust Centres were established in South Africa: one inDurban and one in Johannesburg.2 A national umbrella body, ‘the South AfricanHolocaust Foundation’ (SAHF), was established in 2008 to create better coordinationand cohesion nationally in the field of Holocaust education.
The SAHF’s approach to Holocaust education and educator training is based onthe belief that, while content knowledge of the Holocaust is extremely important,‘providing educators and learners with content alone is not enough. Informing bothschool and educator programmes is the idea that the history of the Holocaust providesa powerful case study for examining the dangers of prejudice and discrimination andthe moral imperative for individuals to make responsible choices and defend humanrights’ (Petersen 2006, 11).
To help the learners expand their own moral compasses, the educator has todevelop the ability to stay neutral in the classroom. Through educators’ responses, itseems that this is proving a difficult and emotional task when teaching about the pain-ful history of apartheid. Many educators cannot divorce their own personal historyfrom that of the required curriculum and find it increasingly difficult to teach aboutthis period. For that reason, teaching the Holocaust as a case study of human rightsabuse serves as an excellent entry point for both educators and learners. This historyis removed from the local experience, as it happened in another country and continentmore than 60 years ago and is less emotionally charged for South Africans. For thesereasons, it has the potential of bringing to the surface personal attitudes and prejudicessuch as racism and xenophobia which otherwise remain hidden. Only when these
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issues are exposed can they begin to be addressed. It is easier to learn values and morallessons from a history removed from one’s own experience yet has some parallels tothe country’s narrative.
South Africa has a great oral tradition, and the use of story-telling to acquireknowledge, values, ethics and morals present itself naturally. Using oral historytestimonies of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, resisters or rescuers has the poten-tial to bring both the content of the Holocaust as well as its lessons to life. In any studyof the Holocaust, the sheer number of victims is hard to grasp. Sharing with learnersthe testimonies of survivors can remind them that people like themselves, withparents, siblings, friends and grandparents are behind the numbers. Survivor testimo-nies also help learners to look more closely at the issue of choices. This in turnconnects back to lessons for humanity. The curriculum also asks for the use of oralhistory in the classroom: for example, learners are encouraged to interview people intheir communities and make connections to their own lives. Personal history is animportant tool to empower learners to have a look at their own life and to draw lessonsfrom their own stories. In South Africa there are very few survivors or rescuers, andthe remaining witnesses to this history are aging. Film can be used very successfullyto make up for this. The SAHF created the film Testimony, in which five Holocaustsurvivors who settled in South Africa share their Holocaust testimony. The film hasproved to be a very powerful educational resource. Another short film created duringa visit in South Africa this year of Hannah Pick-Goslar tells the story of the Holocaustthrough reflections on the friendship between Anne Frank and Hannah. More films arein the process of being developed at the moment in all three Holocaust Centres.Literature can also be used successfully to find the voices of the witnesses. Usingdiary entries or excerpts from memoirs such as the Diary of Anne Frank (Frank andPressler 2007), the works of Elie Wiesel (Night [1981], for instance) or Primo Levi’sIf this is a man (1987), could be used as primary sources and tools to enhance thetraditions of storytelling.
Holocaust education makes it possible for learners to make the connectionbetween the past and the present and translate it into social activism. Teaching thehistory of the Holocaust creates opportunities for learners to reflect on the conse-quences of the choices they might face in their daily lives, by examining theconsequences of choice made by people during the Holocaust. The case study of theHolocaust helps young people to respond more effectively to their present realities.The hope is that learners will be able to move from knowing what they ‘should do’,to actually doing it. There are very few other opportunities in the curriculum wherelearners can strengthen their conviction and learn how to take action by understandingthe factors that can hold them back from action.
Understanding the role of bystanders and choosing to take action is extremelyimportant, especially in a young democracy such as South Africa. Jaap van Proosdij,a Dutch rescuer (recognized by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a Righteous among theNations) lives in Pretoria South Africa. He saved the lives of dozens of Jews in theNetherlands during the Holocaust. When asked: ‘Why did you do it?’ he answeredwith a question of his own: ‘If you see a drowning man, won’t you save him?’3 Forhim, it was a rhetorical question. But sadly for many, the answer is not so clear cut.Most people would not save the drowning man, be it out of fear for their own lives orjust the thought that someone else swims better and so should or would do it. Storiessuch as Jaap van Proosdij’s encourage learners to use critical thinking and developtools of dealing with these difficult dilemmas. Again, processing the issue of choices
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can be empowering for the learners, and it is done through learning about bystandersand upstanders.4 It is vital that learners come to understand that they can choose tobehave like bystanders or they can choose not to. Realizing that there is a choice iscritical. This was the case during the Holocaust, and this is still true today. Primo Levisaid, ‘In spite of the varied possibilities for information, most Germans didn’t knowbecause they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know’ (Levi1986, 381). In fact, bystanders always aid the perpetrators just by keeping silent. Timeand again the learners, like all of us, find themselves in the position of bystanders,standing near, but not taking part when something happens, paralysed by fear or asense of powerlessness. Learning from the bystanders of the Holocaust, the learnersrealize that bystander behaviour is a choice not to get involved, to stand on the sideand look. This kind of behaviour has the same consequence be it in the case ofbullying at school or a fight. Learners can begin to link this understanding to thebroader stage of the country’s history during apartheid. During the xenophobia-relatedriots in May 2008, one of the educators who had been through extensive Holocausttraining, created an opportunity when teaching about the Holocaust for the learners tomake posters and banners and to demonstrate outside the school against those attacks.The learners translated the lessons of the Holocaust to actively becoming upstandersthemselves.
Another opportunity that teaching the Holocaust could bring is to highlight thelinkage between different cases of genocide, human rights abuses or prejudice. InApril 1994, when South Africans were celebrating their freedom from apartheid andpeople were standing proudly in queues for hours to vote, only a mere three and a halfhours flight away, on the same continent at the same time, in Rwanda, hundreds ofthousands of Tutsis were murdered. Yet most educators and learners do not considerthese parallel events and do not make the connections. Introducing the Holocaust andits lessons creates opportunities for that leap to be made.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who is one of the patrons of the SAHF,summed up the opportunities that teaching the Holocaust in South Africa presentswhen he said:
We learn about the Holocaust so that we can become more human, more gentle, morecaring, more compassionate, valuing every person as being of infinite worth, so preciousthat we know such atrocities will never happen again and the world will be a morehumane place. (The Holocaust, lessons for humanity, learner’s interactive resource book2004, 64)
The challenges presented by teaching about the Holocaust in South Africa
The role of the educators as facilitators of knowledge is crucial, but they find itdifficult to divorce themselves from the heavy legacy of apartheid. Educators in SouthAfrica are the largest single occupational group and profession in the country,numbering close to 390,000 in public and private schools.5 The majority of thecurrently serving educators received their training and entered teaching when educa-tion was an integral part of the apartheid regime and organized on racially and ethni-cally divided sub-systems. All educators are now part of the new non-racial,democratic transformation of the education system. Since 1994, they have had to copewith the rationalization of the teaching community into a single national system, theintroduction of new curricula, which emphasize greater professional autonomy andrequire educators to have new knowledge and applied competences, including the use
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of new technologies, and a radical change in the demographic, cultural and linguisticcomposition of the classrooms. In addition, many educators never had the opportunityto speak about their own personal suffering. When given the opportunity, they relatewith great pain stories of prejudice and discrimination experienced during theapartheid era. Despite the famous ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, there aremany unresolved issues in South African society. During educators’ workshops,participants are given the chance to share some of their stories. From comments madeby educators, it would appear that ‘learning about the Holocaust created the emotionalspace for educators to speak frankly about their experiences’ (Petersen 2006, 5). Thus,in moving first into the extreme history of the Holocaust, they were more ready andable to begin examining their own painful history.
In this opportunity also lies the first challenge. As many of the educators learnabout the Holocaust and genocide, they start ‘comparing suffering’. At times, somefeel that apartheid was not ‘as bad as the Holocaust’ or as one educator said: ‘Youthink that apartheid was a walk in the park’. But in many other cases, a number ofeducators and, at times, learners insist that apartheid must also be regarded asgenocide. In a recent educators’ workshop about the Holocaust and the Rwandagenocide, participants angrily declared that apartheid was also genocide. They arguedand became flustered and annoyed. Was it a cry to recognize that their pain alsodeserved the title of genocide? Were they worried that the country’s history wasdiminished by talking about other suffering? There seems to be a need for the ‘ulti-mate’ name to describe their suffering – nothing else will do. Even though facilitatorsemphasize to participants that there is no competition in suffering, it is still a difficulthurdle for participants to cross. Only by creating an exercise, using the Convention ofthe Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and asking for research intohistorical evidence from the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, did participantsbegin to understand the complexities of this issue.
There are some factors in the South African political and educational fields thatcreate particular challenges for teaching the Holocaust in the South African context.
First, the educators have little or no knowledge of the Holocaust. This history wasnever included as a separate module in the national curriculum before, and there wereno local textbooks dealing with its content. It is also a history removed from SouthAfrica, as it happened in the last century on another continent. An approach imple-mented recently in educators’ training workshops includes exercises to examine thebase-knowledge of educators. They are asked to complete a basic mind-map aimed atfinding out how much they know about the Holocaust. The findings are that Holocaustknowledge is very basic; for example, when asked to identify different countries on aEuropean map, almost all educators without exception, cannot find Germany, Polandor the Netherlands. In addition, for the majority of South Africans, modern Europeanhistory is approached with a degree of scepticism, as it is often viewed through thedevastating impact of colonialism.6
Another challenge is the difficulty of making a connection between learning thehistory of the Holocaust and its lessons and actually implementing that lesson in thereality of today’s South Africa. In March 2008, just two months before the eruption ofthe horrific violence against foreigners in South Africa, the SAHF held a workshopfor 60 grade 9 educators. Working in small groups, the educators were given anexercise in which they had to analyse a story where ‘their colleagues had complainedthat the foreigners came to South Africa and took South African jobs’. A substantialnumber of participants agreed that this was in fact true. They became angry and
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emotional and even added to the complaints against foreigners. It was as if all barriershad come down as the participants raged about foreigners in South Africa (Friedman2008). It was a disturbing precursor to the violence ahead. A similar situation occurredin a discussion of stereotypes of Afrikaners in the Skielik shooting incident (anincident where an Afrikaans youth in North-West Province shot and killed blackwomen and children in a racially motivated murder). There was a great deal of rageamong the participants, and feelings of prejudice were largely evident. It was clearthat many of the educators had bought into the values and moral lessons of historyonly insofar as they did not affect them personally. It was easier to be ‘politicallycorrect’ when learning about history, much harder to translate that history and makeit relevant to their lives today.
On a practical level, there are many other challenges: South Africa has 11 officiallanguages. Most educators are required to teach in English. This is often their secondor third language. The same can be said of the learners. Thus, although there is gener-ally an aspiration to speak English as a globally accepted vehicle of communication,it is being understood more and more that, if learners are not taught in their mothertongue, they are placed at a tremendous disadvantage. In addition, most availableresources are only in English. The SAHF published material, at this stage, is in two ofthe official languages other than English. However, many of the educators insist thatthey would prefer to have the English resources, as this is the language they have toteach in. The facilitation of workshops is also a challenge. Usually, they are conductedin English but, where possible, facilitators who speak many of the official languagesof the country are used. In the Western Cape, where the home language of the majorityof people is Afrikaans, facilitation is conducted in both English and Afrikaans. TheWestern Cape provincial department of education seconded to the Cape TownHolocaust Centre a Xhosa-speaking educator who works exclusively in disadvantagedschools were most of the educators and learners are Xhosa speakers. In Durban, anIsiZulu speaking facilitator combines English and IsiZulu in her training and, inJohannesburg, there are a few facilitators who can communicate in Afrikaans, IsiZuluand SeSotho in addition to English. Also, a methodology of a glossary board wasintroduced, an open space where participants can post words and concepts they do notunderstand. These different methods assist somewhat in overcoming the hurdle oflanguage. The SAHF is searching for other solutions and is always willing to trydifferent new ideas to combat this challenge.
South Africa is a vast country with a population of some 48 million. In manyschools, class size is a huge problem, and in many classes there are still up to 50–60learners. There are sadly many schools without electricity or equipment for audio-visual teaching, and access to the Internet for every learner is still a dream. In a coun-try where simple infrastructure is still a challenge and where many of the schools arein deep rural areas, training the educators on how to teach the Holocaust is very diffi-cult. Graeme Bloch, an education policy analyst at the Development Bank of SouthernAfrica, wrote about the state of the schools in South Africa: ‘the vast majority ofschools are dysfunctional in that they are not producing the meaningful outcomes thatare their primary goal … vast inequalities are produced and reproduced in schools, sothat a small band of at most 20% produces the great majority of graduates and successstories in the system’ (Bloch 2009, 59). In the field of Holocaust education, eventhough the SAHF established educational centres in the three major cities of thecountry, most schools have no access to the Holocaust exhibitions in Cape Town,Durban and Johannesburg. One response of the SAHF is the availability of low-tech
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classroom posters or access to a portable travelling exhibition. Seven out of the nineprovinces already own copies of these resources; eventually all nine provinces willhopefully own a few copies of these resources which can then be used for educators’training and also enrich the school teaching experience. This remains an enormouschallenge though.
A growing challenge is the impact of the Israeli–Palestinian crisis. Although overthe years there has been little antisemitism in South Africa, and the South Africangovernment endorses and supports a two state solution,7 Israel is viewed with suspi-cion, and there is both official and popular support for the plight of the Palestinianpeople. This has its roots in both the support of the PLO for the apartheid struggle andalso the fact that Israel supplied arms and military intelligence to the apartheid govern-ment. There is also a relatively large Muslim population (about two million) whichuntil the second intifada enjoyed a very cordial relationship with South Africa’s smalland largely Zionist Jewish Population (about 70,000). The teaching of the Holocaustat times is viewed with suspicion. Questions such as: ‘How can you teach this historyof the Holocaust without condemning what the State of Israel is doing to the Palestin-ian people?’ are posed, and on rare occasions some participants try to shift the focusfrom the Holocaust to the Middle East. The ongoing conflict in the Middle Eastcontinues to fuel the situation even more. Participants continuously ask questions suchas: ‘How come people who suffered so much can become perpetrators?’ or ‘Isn’t whatIsrael does to the Palestinians regarded as genocide?’ The recent article by ProfessorYehudah Bauer, ‘Holocaust and genocide today’, is very helpful to deal with thisissue; he says:
It is important to differentiate between conflict and genocide. Conflict is a confrontationbetween two or more sides, none of which has sufficient power to conquer and/or anni-hilate the other or others, or cannot use the power it has for one reason or another. Bycontrast, a genocidal situation … arises when one party is overwhelmingly powerful, andthe targeted victim is nearly or totally powerless. Thus, the Kashmir problem is aconflict, not a genocidal event … The same applies to the Middle East, where the Pales-tinians cannot overcome Israel with terrorism or rockets, nor can Israel annihilate thePalestinian population; it remains a bloody and difficult conflict, but not a genocide.Conflicts can be solved either by compromise, as a result of negotiations or arbitration,or by the intervention of an outside force, or by the exhaustion of the contending parties,leading to a settlement, or by a victory of one side that will not escalate into massmurder … . (Bauer 2009, 3–4)
The learner and educator workshops are just the beginning of a long process. Thereare hundreds of thousands of educators and learners who have very little knowledgeof the complex history of the Holocaust. The challenge is to find a sustainable way toprovide ongoing support in a way that will be meaningful and empowering. Thequestion of sustainability has led to the initiation of workshops which focus on theDepartment of Education’s different levels of history facilitators. The hope is that theywill be able to cascade the learning to their districts with continuous support. As thisconcept continues to develop, different experiential methodologies will be tried whichit is hoped will give an answer to most of the challenges listed so far.
By incorporating the content, methodologies, appropriate resources and the rele-vance of the Holocaust to the lives of South Africans today, the educators and learnersare called on to use all that they have learned from the study of the Holocaust wisely.A veteran prisoner in Sachsenhausen concentration camp used to tell new prisonersabout the rules of the camp, of the difficulties they would have to endure, of the
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darkness that awaited them. He told it all, honestly and directly. He concluded hisremarks with the words: ‘I have told you this story not to weaken you. But tostrengthen you. Now it is up to you!’ (Berenbaum 1993, 223).
Notes1. The term ‘educator’ is used in South Africa instead of ‘teacher’. The term ‘learner’ is used
instead of ‘pupil’ or ‘student’.2. The Durban Holocaust Centre was opened in March 2008. The Johannesburg Holocaust
Centre was established in January 2008. It operates during its building process and willofficially open in 2010.
3. A conversation between Jaap van Proosdij and Tali Nates in 1998.4. Upstanders is a new word coined by Facing History and Ourselves to describe people who
choose action over inaction.5. For more statistics about education in South Africa see http://www.southafrica.info/about/
education/education.htm.6. Adding to the suspicion, in apartheid South Africa, the term ‘Europeans’ was given to those
classified as ‘white’.7. For the official government policy on the Middle East please see http://www.anc.org.za/
elections/2009/myanc/International%20Relations/. The ANC (African National Congress)states that they ‘Commit to the peaceful resolution of all conflicts in Africa, the MiddleEast and rest of the world. We support a two state solution as a model of peace betweenIsrael and Palestine, recognizing the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state and supportthe establishment of a strong and sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.’
Notes on contributorTali Nates is the director of the Johannesburg Holocaust Centre, member of the South AfricanHolocaust Foundation. She lectures on Holocaust, genocide, reconciliation and human rightsand worked in this field in many countries including Poland, the US and Rwanda. Tali is ascholar and leader of Holocaust education missions to Eastern Europe and genocide studyexperiences in Rwanda. She was born in Israel to a family of Holocaust survivors, her fatherand uncle both saved by Oskar Schindler; the rest of the family perished in the Holocaust. Shehas lived in South Africa for over 20 years, is married and has two children.
ReferencesBauer, Yehuda. 2009. Holocaust and genocide today. Lecture delivered at Clark University,
April 6, in Massachusetts. http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/ghhrcenter/main/Holocaust_and_Genocide_Today-Bauer.pdf.
Berenbaum, M. 1993. The world must know: The history of the Holocaust as told in the UnitedStates Holocaust Memorial Museum. Washington, DC: Little, Brown. A publication of theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Bloch, Graeme. 2009. The toxic mix, what’s wrong with South Africa’s schools and how to fixit. Cape Town: Tafelberg.
Frank, Otto, and Mirjam Pressler, eds. 2007. Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. PenguinBooks.
Freedman, Richard. 2008. Teaching the Holocaust to non-traditional audiences: theSouth African experience. Paper presented at the Yad Vashem International Conference,July 7–10, in Jerusalem.
Friedman, Michelle. 2008. Report on follow-up workshop: Understanding apartheid and theHolocaust. Presented to the Gauteng Department of Education, March 2–4, in Johannes-burg.
Levi, Primo. 1986. Survival in Auschwitz and the reawakening: Two memoirs. New York:Summit Books.
Levi, Primo. 1987. If this is a man. London: Abacus.
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