Task Force For International Cooperation On Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research

Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in Belgium

Click here for an Overview of Holocaust-related activities in Belgium

"The Shoa's lasting memory is fate as much as a duty. It is the fate of every witness: the survivors, the relatives of the victims, their close friends... They cannot forget. But memory is not only their lot; it is the lot of every one of us: this dark page of the past century is engraved for ever in the book of our history. We simply cannot turn the page."

Holocaust Education in the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen

The Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR) is situated in the building which was previously known as the Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, Belgium. It was here that, in 1942, the Nazis established SS-Sammellager Mecheln (SS-Collection Camp Mechelen.)

This place was the departure point for a deportation without return. In the years between 1942 and 1944, 25,000 Jews and Roma were transported to the camps in the East. Two thirds were gassed upon arrival. At the time of the liberation only 1,200 people had survived.

The Kazerne Dossin was therefore, literally, "the waiting room for death." The underlying theme of the Museum is to cover this dark period in Belgian history.

Overview of Recent Pedagogical Activities at the JMDR.pdf  [ Bytes]

For a virtual tour of the Belgian exhibition in Auschwitz click here.

For a short evocation of the Installation Transport XX in Brussels, click here.

herman _van_rompuy_speech.pdf  [ Bytes] 

"Our country joined the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. This allows us to exchange educational materials and examples of good practices to help young people not to let them selves be temted by the missleading attractiveness of stereotypes, prejudice and racism. It must incite them to think about the fundamental freedoms, rights and duties of democracy."

"As the head of the Belgian delegation to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, I can clearly confirm Belgium's commitment to the principles of the Stockholm Declaration. Those principles are enforced through the Belgian legislation and educational programmes. At the federal level two main government bodies are working in cooperation with NGOs on Holocaust-related projects: the National Institute for Invalids of War, Veterans and Victims of War (INIG) has developed activities which preserve and remember the Holocaust, other Nazi crimes and acts of Resistance. The Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism has launched a pilot project aiming at mapping, developing and consolidating actions in the field of democratic education through the study of the historic reality of the Second World War in Belgium (with an emphasis on Holocaust and Resistance). My country will support all the efforts of the chairmanship of the Task Force aimed at involving the European institutions in the implementation of the Stockholm Declaration."

Education

Much progress has been made in Holocaust education in recent years. In our federal system, education policy is a competence exercised autonomously at the level of the French, Flemish and German-speaking communities. This autonomy and the fact that each community may thus have its own approach does not prevent any school from teaching the history of the Shoah, through history, literature, ethics or religious classes.
2005-2006 celebrated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. In order to avoid an unforgivable oversight and to make sure everyone would learn a necessary lesson from this, the "Schools for Democracy" pilot project was started. This initiative led youths through notions like identity, respect, participation and openness to the world, concluding by two main visits: the Nazi camps sites of Breendonck and Auschwitz.
The ambition of the "Schools for Democracy" project was to put together three groups of 200 schoolboys/girls in the 6th year of primary school and three groups of 170 students in the final year of high school. The students came from a very wide range of schools in order to build up tolerance and good citizenship. The educational purpose was to invite students to make a link between history and the moral choices with which they are personally confronted with.
According to Mrs. Simone Veil, former President of the European Parliament, there are two main Antisemitic threats hanging over society: revisionism and a less spectacular one, more insidious and therefore more serious: the difficulty of teaching Shoah history at school. This is why the "A Classroom of Difference" program was launched, with a final seminar for teachers from the three Belgian communities at Yad Vashem in Marc.

Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, speech for
the Commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Belgian education representatives on a study travel on “education of remembrance” at Yad Vashem.

Remembrance

By Government Decree of December 2004, Belgium designated January 27th as "Remembrance Day of the Genocide committed by Nazi Germany". The remembrance ceremony in Auschwitz on January 27th 2005 was attended by H.M. King Albert II and Prime Minister Verhofstadt. In 2006 Belgium, in its capacity as Chairman in Office of the OSCE, organised an OSCE Holocaust Remembrance Day in Brussels to which representatives of all 56 participating States were invited.
Commemorative events related to war are regularly organised throughout the country on three main levels. The Federal Government is in charge of the commemoration, on the 8th of May, of the soldiers who fell in the two world wars and in humanitarian actions of the Belgian army afterwards. On the same day, the Ministry of Defence dedicates a great commemoration to the Unknown Soldier and to the Liberation. There are also many local level commemorations, often with the presence of military units and music bands.
More than 30 monuments in Belgium are dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of the Shoah. Among the best-known is the National Monument to the Jewish Martyrs in Anderlecht, that was unveiled by H. M. King Baudouin more than thirty years ago. ‘Les Territoires de la Mémoire' in Liège adopts an educational view geared towards the future. The main goal is not solely about the past, but how to use the knowledge of history to develop a critical mind leading to a more tolerant and human model.

The Jewish Museum for Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen is located in the former Dossin Barracks, once called "the Waiting Room of Death" due to the central role it played in the deportation of more than 24916 Jews and 351 Gypsies to Auschwitz in 1942-1944. Plans for the construction of a new museum, the Memorial and Documentation Centre for Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, are making good progress. Finally, the JMDR is in charge of the exhibition project of the Belgian wing in Auschwitz.

Research

Compared to their colleagues in neighbouring countries, Belgian historians did not focus on the issue of the persecution of Jews until recently. In the 1970s, research on the persecution of Jews in Belgium took a slow start. The Ceges / Soma (Centre for Historical Research and Documentation of War and Contemporary Society), was founded as late as 1969.
The impetus came from two angles. In 1975 the former Belgian-Jewish Resistance fighters asked Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg to make a new study of the Jews Defence Committee, a resistance organisation founded in 1942 by leftist Jewish circles. This mission coincided with research by the Klarsfelds on the responsibility of the German SS in the persecution of Jews in Belgium. With the help of Maxime Steinberg, this resulted in a trial against former Judenreferent Kurt Asche.
The increasing interest in scientific circles for the persecution of Jews culminated in an international symposium held in Israel in 1989, "The Holocaust in Belgium". The symposium was a result of cooperation between the Bar Ilan University and the Ceges/Soma. Also, in the 1990s, a lot of research was done on assistance by non-Jewish persons to Jews. This resulted in several publications and dissertations with a focus on assistance to Jewish children.
In July 1997, at the request of the Jewish community, the Belgian government created the Study Commission that was to examine the situation of the assets of the members of the Jewish community of Belgium, stolen or abandoned after the Second World War (the so-called Commission on Jewish Assets). The research on the theft of Jewish possessions in Belgium was completely innovative. In July 2001, the report on the study of the theft of Jewish assets was presented.
In the course of the study on the stolen Jewish assets and the collaboration of the authorities, more and more voices were heard in the Jewish community proposing an in-depth study of the likely participation of the Belgian authorities in the persecution and the deportation of Jews. In 2003 the Belgian government complied with this request. The mission was entrusted to the Ceges/Soma. The title of the report-book (2006) gave a clear answer to the question: "Docile Belgium".
Since 2000, theses and monographs were published on: the escape of Jewish deportees from the XXth convoy and Jewish members of the Resistance; the assistance to Jews (Jewish children) and post-war problems of the return of these children to their community; the "Association of the Jews in Belgium", founded by the Nazis; the Belgian diamond trade and the Jewish educational system during the occupation; Belgian ‘Jew hunters' and the re-establishment of the Jewish community in Belgium after World War Two.