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?

FFS Fraxinus, feel better now?

Applaud your own insensitivity.

Back to the thread. I do think we all need awareness of genocides, past and present. For me, it was useful to do something with it as I felt so useless, so speechless with the enormity of knowing. So I focused on it educationally and did work with both HET and Amnesty. I did find that after a while I had to stop. Stop reading and thinking as it was churning and turning in my thoughts. maybe OP it is too much and you have to put on a 'professional' head on when teaching it. The HET website has brilliant resources and ways to focus on survivors and lessons learnt.

Good luck and know that as an educator you can do your bit. " The enormity of the world is not ours to save, nor to ignore".

Not bu at all. I guess also having the responsibility of teaching about this to young people must bring other layers of distress and realisation.
So shocked at news story here in uk yesterday (?) re levels of denial and/or belief of exaggeration re holocaust here in uk.

As others have suggested, try to balance the emotion with stories from survivors. Read some Jack Eisner, a Polish survivor of the ghettos in Warsaw.

I too have read a lot about the Holocaust and feel the same emotions. I couldn't read anything out loud without crying. I read a book called In My Hands and she writes at the start

"There was a bird flushed up from the wheat fields, disappearing in a blur of wings against the sun, and then a gunshot and it fell to the earth. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird, and it was not in a wheat field, but you can't understand what it was yet."

When I eventually read the rest of the book and understood this paragraph it was absolutely chilling. It stuck with me.

And it should, we should be emotional about it and angry and it should be difficult to hear. We don't ever want to repeat it.

You sound like a wonderful history teacher.
I think in the face of such horror honest , raw emotion is a wonderful offering.
Passing this onto young people in this very very frightening world is a gift to them.
Be gentle with yourself .
💐

Thank you for all the replies. I’m so glad that I’m not alone, and I’m glad I took to asking this question. I’m looking into those books books mentioned above.

Ignore the typos, I hadn’t proofread. You see, even a teacher with an Oxbridge undergrad, masters and dphil can’t write perfectly. I hope you’re a teacher too @Frax.

I think in a world where a staggering number of people either claim not to know about the Holocaust, or worse, know but deny it, it is all the more important that teachers communicate the horror of it to their students. I have a strong memory of an otherwise unpleasant, grumpy, barely interested in us history teacher (and I don't think you fit that description at all!) suddenly becoming human when teaching us about the Holocaust, actually crying, broken voice and anguished face, when he talked about a particular sight he'd seen when he visited a death camp. The words understanding that the Holocaust was unbearable, appalling, more terrible than words can communicate and that even this bored, irritated, apparently uncaring man was broken by the truth of it will stay with me forever. Not one person in my class was anything but silent and shaken during that lesson.

I find it agonising and I cry, too, if I talk to my dc about it or read or watch anything about it. And I think that's ok. It's beyond coping with for many of us because... well, because how do you make sense of the Holocaust? I tried to explain to my dc (but did not do very well) that what broke my heart over and over was the knowledge of all the lives not lived. All the normal, boring, 'unimportant' things that make up a life that did not happen. All those villages gone. Even if it is possible to come to terms with the suffering (and for me it is not), I feel such grief for the things that did not happen because the people they would have happened to had been ripped away. I don't think I'm explaining this very well really. I have a sense of overwhelming sadness and enormous anger that these millions of lives were not lived, that the people they belonged go did not get to have them.

I think you just have to be professional about it, OP.
It won’t help educate the young in the horrors of the holocaust if you’re sobbing too much to speak. And modelling emotional incontinence while at work is not great either. Time for the British stuff upper lip (or big girl pants as they say on MN!) and grit your way through it.
I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau with my DDs, and it left an indelible impression on us all, because our Polish guide told us the entire hideous truth completely matter of factly and unemotionally.
I asked her how she didn’t break down in tears and she said she stayed strong for the sake of the survivors, to make sure their story was heard all over the world.
Think of that- stay strong, and in your own small class of students, make sure “the story is heard”.

@Frax Well words fail me that you have contributed to a thread of this sensitivity to point out some typos. Truly sad.

Your feelings are natural, appropriate and necessary.

When I did my degree (analogous to military history) it was often easy for people on the course to develop a bleak, cynical and ultimately inhumanly mechanistic perspective on the things we studied. To counteract this, I would read the testimony from the troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen. The sorrow and grief, the incredible anguish that underlies every report reminds me of essential human empathy and the horror of the atrocity.