Seventy five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the passage of time and the passing away of witnesses to one of the worst genocides in human history has brought an urgency to the question of how the Holocaust will be taught when it is no longer a part of living memory.
Natalia Ivchyk is a history lecturer from Ukraine, a country with a particularly complicated relationship to this period in history. Rivne, her hometown, had a 60% Jewish population during the interwar period and was a richly multicultural city. However, 17,500 local Jews were murdered on 6-7 November, 1941, and on the night of 13-14 July, 1942, the Rivne ghetto was liquidated.
Ivchyk has drawn on her experience using personal, local narratives in the classroom to create a new kind of course on the Holocaust for her university students, one that challenges them to find witnesses among their family and neighbours, and map the forgotten histories of their towns and villages.
