Teaching About the Holocaust: The Gate Connecting Poland and South Africa (PL / EN)

The programme will examine Holocaust and genocide education through two contrasting yet meaningfully interconnected contexts: Poland and South Africa. Although separated by geography, language, and historical experience, both societies emerged in the late 20th century from oppressive political systems — communism and apartheid — and entered fragile democracies while confronting urgent questions of memory, responsibility, and reconstruction. Their educational landscapes provide a compelling lens through which to explore the conference themes of context, connection, and (dis)continuity.

In Poland, Holocaust education develops within a broader landscape shaped by absence, loss, and tensions of memory. It is marked by the difficult negotiation between acknowledging historical entanglement and complicity, and the persistence of heroic national narratives.

In South Africa, discourse on the Holocaust has become a framework through which a post-apartheid society has sought to articulate and process its own history of racial oppression. In this context, Holocaust references have functioned as a bridge for discussions about apartheid, genocide in Africa, and the dangers of dehumanising language — allowing for the expression and reinterpretation of local experiences of injustice through a global historical prism.

By bringing these two cases into dialogue, the presentation considers how Holocaust education can operate as a space of connection across time and place: linking distinct histories of violence, offering comparative tools for understanding contemporary injustice, and revealing both the possibilities and limitations of universalising historical narratives. This comparative perspective highlights not only the continuities between past and present, but also the ruptures that shape how societies remember, teach, and transform their histories.

This is an accompanying event organized by the Galicia Jewish Museum.