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When a group of Victorian Holocaust educators met online during isolation in 2020, their aim was to develop a world-class educational program in response to the Victorian Government’s declaration that Holocaust Education in Victorian schools would become compulsory. Over three months, current best practice pedagogy was developed by representatives from the Department of Education Victoria, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, The Jewish Holocaust Centre Melbourne, Yad Vashem, Monash University, Courage to Care, and graduates of the Gandel Philanthropy Scholarship Program for Australian Holocaust Educators. Part of those discussions explored how to embed Australian voices into the narrative of the Holocaust, and how to use Australian content in engaging and relevant ways.
One avenue for educators to consider is using Australian resources from our national facilities such as the National Library of Australia’s ‘Trove’ website, which has digital records of Australian newspapers going back to the arrival of the First Fleet. The benefits of using sources from these national facilities is it helps to make the Holocaust relevant for students in Australia, providing Australian voices and experiences to what was happening overseas.
The ‘Trove’ database has over 23,000 Australian newspaper articles from across the country between 1939 and 1945 that contain the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Germany’. A simple ‘Advanced Search’ on ‘Trove’ allows teachers to tailor their resources to their local community. This enables them to show students that while the Holocaust was happening overseas people in Australia were aware of it and reacting to it.
For example, if you were a teacher living in Horsham, Victoria, and you were teaching the Holocaust, you would be able to find articles published on the National Library of Australia’s ‘Trove’ data base that were published in ‘The Horsham Times’. These articles not only talk about the Jewish situation in Europe, but also the local response to what was happening, providing insight to how local communities were addressing anti-Semitism.
One article, titled ‘Is this the war of Armageddon?” was published on the 3 December 1940, and talks of how Horsham’s Christian Community response to anti-Semitism, citing an address given by a pastor to his congregation, where he advises them that they have ‘been commanded to watch’. Another article, titled ‘Hitler’s Great Fear – Religion’, was published on the 14 November 1939, and reports on a Methodist priest, Reverend Hawkins, who was telling local parishioners the story of Rabbi Sanger whom the reverend regarded as ‘one of the most brilliant rabbis of the Jewish faith’. Reverend Hawkins used Rabbi Sanger’s story as a warning to local parishioners about what was happening in Germany. Rabbi Sanger had been forced out of Germany by the Nazis, and resettled in St Kilda. It ends with the statement that ‘provided we can keep our own democracy pure and undefiled, we have nothing to fear’. These two articles tell us a lot about Horsham at the time, and how the local community was reacting to events on the other side of the world.
Likewise, if I was a teacher in Healesville, I would be able to draw on the resources of the ‘Healesville Guardian’ using ‘Trove’ to show students how the Nazis were being portrayed in local newspapers. In an article titled ‘Analysis of Issues – Can Germany Wage a Long Contest’, which was published on 16 September 1939 states that “democracy recognises and honours all that is great in man-the things that manifest themselves, as art and science, as passion for truth, the creation of beauty, and the ideas of freedom and justice. This is ignored by Nazism, which teaches extreme contempt for humanity”, a clear definition of Nazism for students to understand. It then notes what is at stake; “everything that makes life worth living-freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of action” before discussion why it is important to fight against fascism with “with an infinitely greater determination to win”.
Linking newspaper articles like these to local RSL’s and local cenotaphs and local Avenues of Honour, allows educators to demonstrate what local men and women fought and died for, helping make not only World War II more relevant, but the Holocaust, too. Using these articles in conjunction with records from the Australian War Memorial about the local people who served during World War II. Such lesson have the potential to be a really enriching way of teaching the new Victorian Curriculum for Holocaust Education, while empowering students to know more about the history of their local community.
‘Trove’ contains over 4,000 articles from Victorian newspapers about the Jews during World War II. There are local newspapers for most communities in the state. Articles from these newspapers can be located by a simple ‘Advanced Search’ that uses the terms ‘Jews’ and ‘Germans’, and by entering in the time frame 1939 to 1945. These articles allow us to get an insight to how the Holocaust was being reported locally during this period, and how our Victorian communities responded to what was happening in Europe and the Middle East. By localising the content that we use, we can help make the Holocaust more accessible to our students, providing Australian voices to the Holocaust narrative.
The ‘Trove’ database also allows teachers to either use the original article, which has been digitally scanned, or to download the article as a PDF, or to create a text version of it. This function is particularly helpful for embedding and formatting the articles in Word documents for student resources in classrooms. The database and its functions are worth playing around with to get a feel for the materials that you can get access to as a teacher.
With Anzac Day coming up in April, Victorian Teachers could consider doing a unit of work on William Cooper, an indigenous Australian man who, along with his delegation, was involved in the only known public protest in response to Kristallnacht in the world. William Cooper was elderly, and walked for over 11 kilometres from his home in Footscray to the Melbourne CBD to deliver a protest resolution to the Germany Embassy on Collins Street.
Using newspaper articles we can locate the exact wording of the resolution to teach students about the protest. This can allow teachers to have rich discussions about the purpose of protest, and why aboriginals, who weren’t even citizens of Australia at the time, would have become involved.
We can explore how the delegation met before the protest, and the logistics of organising it, and how the protest was advertised in ‘The Age’ on Saturday 3 December 1938. We can look at how indigenous communities from as far away as Dubbo supported the protest via telegram (‘Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate’, 1 December 1938), and the overall significance of the protest at a state and national level.
We can use local newspapers such as ‘The Argus’, ‘The Age’, or, ‘The Herald’ to explore how Kristallnacht was being reported in Melbourne, and what people knew about it, to get an understanding of why William Cooper and his delegation decided to make their protest. We can also use articles to explore how other people in our city were advocating for Jews during this period, and look at responses from citizens to Kristallnacht in letters to the editor. Articles such as these can help humanise the Holocaust for students.
The National Library of Australia is just one tool that Victorian teachers can use for teaching the new Victorian Curriculum for Holocaust Education. It is a tool that localises the Holocaust narrative, and provides another option for educators wondering how they can approach it in a meaningful, localised way.