A Lesson About Home in a Class about the Holocaust
by
Miriam Ben Yoseph
One of my earliest childhood memories has to do with the Holocaust. I was convinced that if I tried hard enough, I could erase the number tattooed on my aunt’s arm. Of course, that was not possible, but it gave me and my aunt the opportunity to begin talking about her experience in Auschwitz. I was eager to learn more about the Holocaust, but the educational system in Communist Romania at the time I lived and went to school there did not provide many opportunities in this regard. After my mother and I immigrated to Israel, I learned more about the Holocaust in history classes, but my most significant learning occurred in the United States when a colleague asked me to teach a course about the Holocaust at DePaul University.
The course we designed combined a study of the Holocaust with travel to the actual sites in Europe, including concentration camps and death camps. Our students were working adults and mostly non-Jewish. Discussions following the visit to the sites acquired an interest and intensity impossible to achieve when limiting the learning experience to the classroom.
The longer I taught the subject the more questions I had about it. Some of these questions related to the meaning(s) of home. This is not that surprising. The Holocaust was, after all, an extreme manifestation of non-belonging and of homelessness, as some scholars pointed out. I wanted to introduce the concepts of home and homelessness to better understand how the Holocaust may have shaped the meaning of these concepts in general and for Jews in particular.
I just did not know how to begin.
The opportunity presented itself towards the end of our trip to Europe. We were flying from Berlin to Amsterdam, and we were catching a flight from Amsterdam back to Chicago. We encountered a bad storm on the way and after a difficult landing in Amsterdam, the airport closed. We waited 36 hours for our flight back to Chicago. Since the airport closed unexpectedly, we also experienced food and water shortages and the rapid disappearance of habitual conveniences such as a place to sit down and a clean bathroom. I am aware that these are inconveniences of privilege, but these are also challenges that do not occur in the conventional classroom.
In that anonymous sea of tired and disoriented people from all over the world, my students, at their own initiative, created a space for all of us that connected us deeply there and then and for many years to come. It was a small space on the floor of one of the terminals bordered by our group’s carry-on bags. We shared food and water we still had in our backpacks and slowly settled down. Some students were talking, others were playing cards, and some were reading or writing in their journals. Some fell asleep. One student brought a chair he found for the oldest student in our group, but she refused to be the only one to sit on a chair. At some point, a few students started talking about the class, but focusing more on their own experiences with racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and difference in general. One student talked about a difficult personal problem. The give and take was not always easy but seemed more candid than on other occasions. Students seemed comfortable to be taking some risks, not only with each other but also with themselves. I had the impression that those participating in the conversation were not only providing ideas and opinions, they were also listening with an empathy I did not sense before, asking questions, and even shifting their positions a little—in light of what they heard and perhaps in light of what they had just seen a day or two before.
The learning experience wasn’t just extended beyond the classroom as a strategy. It was extended unintentionally and against everyone’s wishes into an alienating space.
With their words and actions my students transformed a transient and confusing space into a temporary retreat, a safe heaven, a sanctuary—a mirror of home.
