To be unable to deal with my emotions regarding the holocaust?

[zuuk]

I teach history, and one topic I have to cover is WW2 and inevitably, the holocaust.
I cannot deal with my emotions regarding the holocaust. I’ll try and read something about it, and I’ll feel a prang of emotion, I have to stop for a second, or I will cry. I just cannot process the emotions.

I went to a trip with other history teachers to the holocaust memorial centre in DC and I was the most effected, having had to go to the loo to sob.

I usually very rarely cry.

I watched the recent BBC documentary on the Last Survivors, and I had tears running down my face throughout. I just feel so effected by it. I’m almost obsessed, I watch anything related to shoah.

I must add that I’m not Jewish. My mother was adopted during the war, and it is very likely her father was Jewish.
I’d also add that I am another “category” of person that would have been persecuted.

Why can I not seem to deal with my emotions? Why can I not take a step back, like with other harrowing events I teach?

Simply because you are a decent human being. I too have read books by Holocaust survivors and I am a sobbing wreck. It is simply beyond comprehension the evilness of the Nazis. The deniers are as bad as the extermination that did happen.

YANBU I wept the entire way through that documentary. I think many people would tbh. Even my husband who never cries shed a few tears! Dont feel ashamed of expressing that emotion.... I think it's important to be honest especially if you are a teacher. Makes it hit home how utterly horrific it all was.... like that documentary was saying, soon all the actual witnesses will be dead but we mustn't let the impact and memory of that horror die... because then it becomes easier for it to happen again.

That makes you a great history teacher.

WH Auden said " No poem ever saved a person" , also Primo Levi has written about how the holocaust actually made language die as there are no words. None. I too teach history and have brought students to the death camps, it actually nearly did me in. There simply is no comfort or words to help. At one point in Auschwitz I put my arm up on a wall and wanted to bite my own vein because I had a visceral knowledge of knowing I was part of a species that could do that. "Knowing is not seeing". I think everyone should go to Auschwitz because there is the final path of racism and hate. It is the only experience Ive had that actually changed me.

I work in a field where you have to deal with some upsetting things and I think of myself (perhaps too generously) as a tough person emotionally and I was reading DD a novel the other day which touched on the occupation then liberation of Warsaw (not even the Holocaust directly) and I could hardly get the words out. How everyone suffered, the inhumanity we were capable of inflicting on each other.

You are a good and warm person to be so affected. I know it’s hard with kids, we can’t totally break down, how about just practising the passages lots of times first so they are not so shocking and emotionally taxing, of course it is wonderful you are so moved, how can we be otherwise in the face of such suffering?

Bless you and good luck.

If you can it’s worth considering going to a talk by a survivor at the Halocaust centre in Newark, it’s very inspiring, and their accounts are of course dreadful but somehow also uplifting, the spirits of the survivors are extraordinary.

Same for me
I have many academic books and papers on everything from the build up, the war, the cold war and the end of the cold war.
I was writing my dissertation on the fall of communism.
I don't know how you DM on here but if you want to DM me, you're welcome to. It might help me locate the bloody thing.

Thanks to a history teacher just like you, zuuk and Cheery, I have a lifelong fascination with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I always shed a tear when remembering all those who died and whilst I'm not Jewish either, it seems certain I would have been put to death too.

In the great scheme of things, it really wasn't that long ago. Real people with real lives being snatched away and taken to the camps, simply because of their religion. All we can really do is continue to remember these people and tell their story. Ensure that they are never forgotten and also do our bit to make sure that no person is persecuted for their beliefs again.

Have you heard of quite recent book called The Tattooist of Auschwitz ,very uplifting and well written book about exactly one job this man did. I know it isn't what is going to make it better but will definitely give you more uplifting picture of concentration camps. Or the film called The Zookeeper's Wife, I cried when I went to see it but is such an uplifting story. I am glad it has been told.
My granny who lived as a young woman during the WW2 in occupied Poland told me once that nobody who survived that war was normal any more after what they saw and experienced.

I would really recommend The Choice by Edith Egar, a death camp survivor and 90something psychologist, which is about processing and transcending trauma. It might really help.

crimsonhair, with all due respect I do not think there is anything 'uplifting' about the holocaust, and teachers have taught and read most books about it. I think OP is dealing with the knowledge of the utter hopelessness, despair and fustily of the deaths, murder and utter horror of what humans do to each other. Fictions try to minimise and indeed humanise what happened but they don't help adults who know what happened. I get certain books to introduce children but really....

I have read a lot about the Holocaust. I read a book written by someone who literally grew up in a concentration camp as a boy. He wrote it based on his unfiltered memories - so very first childhood memories onwards. As a boy he accepted the concentration camp as normal, and the boom is written in that way. And it is the most gut wrenching thing I have ever read.

mary markle was the book "Night'?

yanbu. There's no way in a million years I'd be able to teach that. It was bad enough when I did it first - and last, hopefully - time around when I was in school.

yy it's important we know what happened and we must never forget - but is it necessary to fill young people's impressionable heads with the terrible details?

That makes you a great history teacher.

^ this. I'd rather my DCs were taught by a history teacher like you than one with a heart of stone who taught history with no feeling whatsoever. Emotional feelings are a big part of history when we learn the often traumatic stories about the past - it didn't happen to cardboard cut outs but to real people and if we don't feel for them then what does it say about ourselves?

I can't remember the name of the book. I read it only once. But googling about the book Night, I dont think it was. The book I read was about a young child brought up in a concentration camp, not a teenager.

Also when I read a short description in a newspaper about some babies in a concentration camp. That was horrific.

But these things happened to real people, real children, real babies. All I am doing is reading about it. And I think I should be upset. If I wasn't, then something would be wrong.

I had a history teacher who became so angry when he taught us about the Holocaust. Not at us, but his anger at what happened was so palpable, it affected us all. It made us understand the absolute, unjustifiable inhumanity of it and to know that it's OK to get angry over injustice and that it's our responsibility to try and stop it when we can.

If you're concerned about breaking down in front of your students, don't. It's right to feel sadness at such things. And in this world of internet poseurs and fake emotions, some real emotion over something so horrible might be a good thing for your students to see.

@Cherrymom I was talking about books based on real events and never implied that Holocaust was uplifting! Just that some people went above their responsibilities to help others. About humanity they showed to each other. That is also a face of Holocaust. So is Yad Vashem.

Because you are a nice decent human being , I'm the same, if I read into any thing too much (deaths, disasters etc and read about the victims etc it humanizes them more for me and they stop being a statistic and start being a real person and it affects me (makes me sad for the person and their loved ones even though I never knew them)

The events of the two world wars were terrible times for those who lived through this period of history. It is OK to get upset about this.

We have no Jewish heritage in our family, but My Grandfather fought in the trenches of WW1 and went over the top at the Battle of the Somme. My Father and his brother served in WW2 and we have made sure our children were aware of the history involved. My daughter is currently reading the Tattooist, she and her BF are going to France in May to see the WW1 and WW2 sites.

My Uncle was the RAF regiment during WW2 and spent 6 years in Burmah, before being repatriated. During this time his family had no idea whether he was alive or not. The older people in our family told us kids that he had endured terrible suffering, but did not ever give further details. My father served in the Royal Navy during WW2 and one of the jobs he did after WW2 was on board ships to Burmah to repatriate POW. He told the family that he spent all the time he could when off watch as an engineer, looking at the POWs as they were helped on board. He was looking for the brother that he had not seen for 6 years.

My uncle returned to civilian life, he never married, lived with his mother and was the favourite uncle when we were all growing up. As children we were never told the details of what happened in Burmah. It is understandable that adults would keep difficult information from children. As an adult I need to confront the truth and do some research, but it will be hard.

Yes, it’s a painful subject to try to impart and inevitably you paint a picture.
It’s as vivid and raw as you can get, there is no way of making it palatable and it should not be shared in any other way.

Such a good description “making language die”.
Visiting Bergen Belsen as a 12 year old child in silence, feeling utterly overwhelmed by the sadness and oppressive blackness of the place will stay with me for my life time.
It needs to be taught, if you teach it with emotion and sadness, you are teaching it well imho.

I was like this. Looking back, it was a focus for my postnatal depression/anxiety. It's hard because, of course, any rational response would be very very emotional - what a horrific event - yet it felt like my reaction was 'too' much. Hard to explain. Like depression in general is in some ways a perfectly rational response to seeing life, and people, as they really are, but is still not healthy.

I can never watch films or read books or documentaries about the Holocaust as it distresses me so much. The fact that humans can do such vile atrocities to other humans, literally breaks my heart.

That saying, I have tried to explain to my dcs about what happens if you stand back and let such atrocities happen. Better to fight than to look the other way.

Springydaff, YES.
Every society has a responsibility to teach every generation about the Shoah and every other genocide. From the slave trade, the killing of Native Americans, the Kurds, Cambodia, Rwanda unfortunately and distressingly, the list is a long one.
The Shoah MUST be taught and discussed and learnt because of the horrific efficiency and a certain casualness with which it was carried out.
I'm German, my father is German, but my mother was West Indian. I would never have existed. Neither would my four amazing children.
"Impressionable minds," what makes you think that young people are any more impressionable than those followers of evil who believed the lies in the first place?

I sympathise with you and applaud your sensitivity.

However I need to gently point out that it's 'pang' of emotion, not prang (that usually means a car collision) and that the word you need is affected, not effected.

I only point these out because you are teaching and you need not to pass these errors on.
Sorry if it's already been said on the thread.