Holocaust Educational Trust

This chapter explores the contribution that David Cesarani made to both Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) and Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT). Demonstrating the impact of HMD, we are able to show the far-reaching impact of Cesarani’s contribution as, firstly a founding trustee and secondly as a historical adviser. The chapter also gives some background to the establishment of both HMD and HMDT, in which Cesarani was heavily involved.

Century examines two groups of women who volunteered or were conscripted as auxiliaries for the Nazis in administrative roles: SS-Helferinnen, who supported the SS, and Nachrichtenhelferinnen who supported the army. Century explores the roots of each group, outlining the recruitment processes and the expectations placed upon the recruits. In doing so, she identifies important differences between the two groups, reflected in the way the two groups were perceived and received by the general public. Drawing on a variety of case studies, Century is able to determine why women chose – where such a choice existed – to volunteer as either an SS-Helferin or a Nachrichtenhelferin.

At the time of writing, two major landmarks have occurred in what might be called the history of the ‘afterlife of Holocaust memory’ in Britain.1 Most recently, the beginning of a new academic year in schools and colleges in England and Wales brought the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the National Curriculum — an event of immense significance in relation to Holocaust education in the United Kingdom. Whereas previously the presence of the Holocaust in educational curricula varied considerably, the incorporation of the genocide into the statutory content for the first National Curriculum for History in 1991 ensured that school history would become a core conduit in the expansion of knowledge and awareness among a new generation of young people. Beyond the chalkface, the other noteworthy anniversary of 2011 took place on 27 January when Britain held its tenth annual Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). A day which ‘provides an opportunity for everyone to learn the lessons from the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides and apply them to the present day to create a safer, better future’, HMD speaks to and of a process of heightened insti-tutionalisation which began in earnest at the turn of the millennium and has continued unabated since.2 HMD thus provides an illuminating window onto the preconceptions, priorities and politics which currently envelop and influence the shape of memorialisation in Britain, but it also does much more than this: as one of the first such days to be created in Western Europe following the Stockholm Declaration of 2000, Britain’s HMD also gestures to a gamut of issues related to memorialisation in general and Holocaust memory in the contemporary world in particular. Amongst others, these include the practices and procedures of collective remembrance, the forces behind a ‘turning’ to memory in the postmodern epoch, and the rationale for (and consequences of) the emergence of the Holocaust as a global phenomena in the past quarter of a century.