Ep. 81- Vicarious Trauma at Holocaust Museums with Julie Golding

HAve you encountered material on the Holocaust that you find disturbing or upsetting?  Was it in your reading or at a Holocaust site or museum?  In this episode, I talk with Julie Golding about the challenges of presenting such material in Holocaust education and at Holocaust museums.

How shoudl museums address the emotional wellbeing of their visitors?  What kinds of content is appropriate (and how do you decide?). We talk about these and many other issues in our conversation.

Julie J. Golding is a Holocaust educator, museum professional, and Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair of the Master's in Holocaust Education at Touro University.

Golding, Julie J. Unseen Scars:: Vicarious Trauma at Holocaust Museums, Exhibitions, and Memorial Sites (2026)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.782)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Waiteman Bourne. And one of the things that I suspect all of us have in common, listeners, guests, et cetera, if you're interested in the Holocaust at any level, you've probably come across material or places or both that have been upsetting, horrifying, traumatic, etc. that's sort of the nature, nature of the beast.

But one of the things should think about is how do educators and museums and sites deal with this kind of material? How should they deal with this kind of material? And how can they care for the people who are going through these institutions while also being honest and faithful to the severity of the content that they are presenting? And I have with me an educator, a scholar.

Julie Golding, who has worked on this and studied this phenomenon and this challenge in museums and education. and she's a a fantastic person to walk us through some of these issues. So Julie, thanks so much for coming on.

Julie Golding (01:13.049)
Thank you for having me.

Waitman Beorn (01:15.032)
Can you start really just quickly by telling us how you got into this? I mean, how how did you come across this particular topic?

So I wrote my book, Unseen Scars. It was published in the last year, and people often ask me, why did you write this book? So the short answer is that I wrote the book I wish someone had handed to me 20 years ago when I started teaching. But the real answer starts with a student.

And that student, I'll call her Rachel, was a student that I taught in my first year in a classroom. I had a class full of 12th grade students all eager to learn, eager to understand more about the Holocaust. I had the training, the content, the pedagogy, the knowledge.

Except for one student, and I'll call that student Rachel. Rachel sat in the back of the classroom the whole year. She didn't say a word. I tried to reach out to her, I tried to speak to her, and nothing really worked. I spoke to the principal, I just couldn't connect with this student. At the end of the year, on the last day of class, Rachel handed in her final exam and it was completely blank. And on the paper,

She had written one sentence. She wrote, Thank you for teaching me this year. Your class wasn't as bad as I expected. I didn't see any dead bodies. And I realized in that moment that something was up. And as I investigated, I found out that Rachel had experienced a very traumatic event when she was younger. She and her sister had heard the passing music of an ice cream truck. And when they ran out to catch the passing ice cream truck,

As they crossed the street, a car struck her sister and killed her on impact. And then the school told me that they had taken Rachel to a Holocaust museum a few years earlier, and she had a really hard time with it. And they should have told me. And I realized in that moment that I was prepared to teach about the Holocaust, but I was not prepared for the emotional fallout for how to prepare my students emotionally for what they were about to encounter.

Julie Golding (04:27.968)
And so, fast forward a couple of years, I began working in Holocaust museums. I was director of education at a Holocaust museum. And I was actually attending a conference for school principals. And this was shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which was the largest school shooting of in an elementary school in the United States to date. And people were talking about lockdown drills. It was a session on school preparedness, lockdown drills.

trainings for teachers, safety rooms, and then the conversation shifted to emotional safety. And they realized that students were getting triggered by the drill itself, by the loud noises, by the fear that something bad could happen to them. And I remember sitting in that room thinking that my work as a Holocaust educator was fundamentally different from that of all the other people.

Because I was, they were all trying to shield their students from difficult knowledge. And I was knowingly walking in and introducing mass atrocity, death, and and and suffering and violence. And I realized there had we have to do something different in this field of Holocaust education than all the other educators out there. And so I set out to do the research on this book.

I really look at Holocaust museums and memorial sites. And I did a study on visitors to the exhibit, Auschwitz not long ago, not far away, which was housed terrific exhibit, the largest exhibit about Auschwitz outside of Auschwitz itself. And I surveyed visitors to try to understand what is it that is happening when people enter into an exhibit about the Holocaust? How much engagement are they having?

How is it affecting them emotionally? And all those types of things. And what difference is there for students who have previously experienced trauma when they enter into this space? And that question kept spiraling into larger questions of: well, what if somebody's previously met a survivor? Or what if somebody is a descendant of a Holocaust survivor? And that's really where the research comes from.

Waitman Beorn (06:43.277)
I mean, this is this is so interesting because there there are so many angles to this, sort of so many balls in play, you know, when you're when we're trying to to think about how how do we handle this, and they they come from two different directions too, right? Or multiple directions, right? I mean, one of them is sort of, you know, as I always tell my students that museums have a thesis, right? I mean, a museum is trying to present a story to you, is put it's trying to tell you something, teach you something.

about something, right? So it has a thesis, it's making an argument. which is as I tell my students, that that doesn't mean it's biased or that it's a bad thing, but you they they had something they're trying to do. and that means that sometimes they think we need to present certain things, certain elements must be in the story. Coming from the other direction, the one you're sort of mentioning, is what is the effect that that has on the people that come through it, right? And these things

you know, as you point out in in your work, are not necessarily always aligned or often are in are in in some ways in conflict, right? and we'll we'll talk about this I I think a lot more because I think one of the things that all of us who teach about the Holocaust at at any level are always mindful of and in a certain sense wrestling with. and again I think we'll cover this a lot, is this is this almost sort of subconscious instinctual

feeling that we have to present horrifying things to to show how bad the event was. but then also a question of which things are those? And, you know, h how to put it bluntly, sort of how horrifying is okay and how horrifying is gratuitous or harmful or whatever. and so I think that that kind of your your your introduction there sort of set up the conversation. but maybe we can take a step back because you know

I'm an historian, so we like definitions. Maybe we can start just kind kind of talking a little about what is trauma in in this context, the context of trauma that you we might experience, you know, visiting a museum, a Holocaust museum. And I think, you know, also it gare it it goes without saying that there are other events out there that, you know, may it may ha may have the same kind of problems, right? I'm thinking about the the museum of

Waitman Beorn (09:06.559)
African American history in DC, you know, when you start out in the bottom and it's like the slave ships and that kind of stuff, you know. So that I think that this is something that, you know, while there are unique aspects to the Holocaust, there are also common aspects to any sort of violent or traumatic history. So may maybe we start by sort of like how do you think about or define trauma for for visitors?

Julie Golding (09:30.765)
You know, you said something earlier about these two ideas of presenting historical information and affecting the visitors are not always in alignment. And I thought that was a great word, the word alignment, because that's where trauma studies come in. I really see Holocaust education sitting at the intersection of museum studies, Holocaust history, and trauma studies.

Trauma is defined by the American Psychological Association as a response to an event. It is a response to horrific event and to a terrible event. And it's not the event itself, but it's how we respond to it. And what's interesting is that.

About fifty percent of students in the United States have experienced trauma and about thirty percent of them

show show have classroom behavior issues because of it. So it's important to realize a lot of people have experienced trauma. And what trauma looks like is this shattering of one's sense of self and a shattering of the world. So if you've ever experienced trauma, you'll know there's like this breakdown of a sense of time, trying to can't really process what's going on around you. And

But what happens when we what happen what really is crucial, the crucial part to my research is what I call is what we call vicarious trauma. And vicarious trauma is a term that's really pulled from the field of mental health.

Julie Golding (11:10.712)
It it is what happens when you are exposed to someone else's pain or to someone else's trauma. So I like to compare it to secondhand smoke. You're not the guy holding the cigarette, but you're breathing it in. You're breathing in that smoke. And so when you visit a Holocaust museum, you are encountering artifacts, photographs, testimony of other people's pain.

So there's really these two parts to it. And then the question of if somebody's experienced pain, a trauma themselves, how might they have more difficulty looking at another person's pain? But the basic question is as visitors, we're walking in and we're experiencing someone else's pain vicariously. And again, this is common in the field of mental health for people who

respond you know journalists, mental health workers, people who respond to natural disasters, emergency medical personnel. and the research really comes from that field, and that's what I applied to this field.

You mentioned looking at different sites and how the idea of trauma and you mentioned the idea of a slavery museum. So what Holocaust museums and slavery museums have in common is that they both fall under the field of dark terrorism.

And dark tourism is on the rise. Dark tourism is basically sites, visiting sites that are related to death, violence, or suffering. So they include things like slavery museums, Holocaust museums, they include prison tours, cemetery tours, visits to nuclear disaster sites.

Julie Golding (12:54.224)
And as I mentioned, the visits, studies show that visits to these sites are on the rise. People really like to visit these types of sites. And again, they're visiting nuclear disaster sites despite the risk of radiation. So we have to ask ourselves: why do people want to visit these sites and why are we inherently drawn to visit these sites? And I'll even add in there that some sites that are not

Dark tourist sites, necessarily like a Holocaust museum or a concentration camp, can still have elements of dark tourism to them. So let's say, for example, the Eiffel Tower and stories of people who commit suicide there, somehow tour guides need to bring those stories up in these spaces, and they are very attractive to people. People like to hear these stories. One of the best examples I have of that is a couple of years ago I was in Colorado visiting Pikes Peak, and Pikes Peak is one

Tallest Mountains in the United States and we were taking the train ride up to the top of the mountain. And on the way, you're passing all the beautiful trees and waterfalls and animals, and you're sort of you know enjoying the ride up.

And on the way, they tell you two stories. One story is the story of a donkey who was carrying dynamite to help build the railway and got blown up, and they point out the monument on the side. And the other story they like to tell is about this couple that were one time walking down the mountain and a storm was coming. The train stopped to ask them if they wanted to ride down the mountain, and they said, no, we'll be okay. It turns out a storm.

Came very quickly, and then a few days later their bodies were found frozen on the mountain. And it turns out they were a newlywed couple, and in the pocket, they were on a honeymoon, and in the pocket, the man's pocket, was a note from somebody that said, Enjoy your trip to Pike's Peak. I hope you don't freeze to death. But what's really bizarre is that there's a photograph of these two bodies sold as a postcard in the gift shop.

Julie Golding (15:00.502)
And the what they say is that this postcard is the most popular souvenir for people to purchase.

So clearly.

Waitman Beorn (15:08.341)
I actually confession time, when I read that in the book, I actually I actually Googled it. and one of the things that did come up was the postcard in the gift shop at for Pike's Peak. And and and and what it made what it also made me think about, and I'll bring this up too because I you you you talk about it in the book, which is the nine eleven museum. And I visited it s I I'm I'm date I'm trying to date this 'cause I'm I don't want to say they're still doing this, but when I visited it

Julie Golding (15:18.324)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Julie Golding (15:27.971)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (15:36.748)
you know, relatively r soon after it was opened, in the gift shop, there were two items that were just that blew my mind. One of them was a stuffed cadaver dog. Like you could buy a stuffed animal that was like, you know, fitted out like the cadaver dogs, the rescue dogs. And the other one was a cheese plate of the in the shape of the United States with the sites of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. And I just

Julie Golding (15:46.945)
Hm.

Julie Golding (15:53.4)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (16:05.951)
It's kinda like when I see the people the when I see the at Auschwitz when they have the refrigerator magnets. And I'm just like, who who buys that? Who what are we doing? Like why why would we buy that? so I so the the postcard strikes me as as in the same in the same sort of vent you know vein as as this dark tourism. But I mean I guess I'd like to take a minute and just ask you w what do you think? W why

Julie Golding (16:11.192)
Mm-hmm.

Ha ha ha.

Julie Golding (16:18.112)
Let's take a step back.

Julie Golding (16:26.616)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (16:33.267)
W why is this so attractive? because one of the challenges, you know, as a former museum professional, you are a museum professional and a and a professor, you know, one of the challenges when you're curating exhibits or that kind of stuff is you know, unfortunately, sadly, all the visitors are not me. You know, they they are they're in a wide variety and you had a great ser a great breakdown of the sort of three kinds of visitors in the book, and I'm forgetting the the names of them, but you know, people come there for

Some some people are like my family, who was like, we will relentlessly read every single thing systematically as we go through the entire museum and we'll take four hours. Some people are kind of like, I want to see the highlights, you know. And some people are like, I just I I'm only kind of here to to sort of do a drive-by. And of course, the challenge for museum professionals is, you know, how do we try to make the museum engaging for all of those groups simultaneously? But take a step back from that. You know, what what is it about?

about these places, this these sort of horrible places that make us want to want to visit.

Julie Golding (17:36.109)
Hmm. Yeah. It's a great question. And it helps us understand motivations of visitors, as you just mentioned. And I

What I like to boil it down to is this idea of attraction and revulsion, that we as humans want to look at something and simultaneously turn away. It's like when you drive past a car accident and you're like, what happened? And then you're like, no, I don't want to really see that. So that's on a little bit of a smaller scale, but it's the same idea. There's this human impulse to want to see it and then say, no, no, I don't actually want to see that. So I think

that's what's drawing people to these sites.

Definitely to the more some of the more graphic images is this desire to want to see it. there's this human human attraction to seeing to seeing what's going on, to wanting to understand. And I guess as we get into this talk, we'll talk about different ways that museums have dealt with hiding the information or not quite hiding the information, making it more accessible or less accessible. Sometimes if you make it less accessible, people want to know what's behind that screen. So these are really the challenges that museums are dealing with.

And but you know, it's interesting because you brought up the 9-11 museum, and the 9-11 museum is a beautifully designed space, the museum itself. There's a tremendous, tremendous thought was put into the design of the museum, and they worked with psychologists on designing it in a way so that there would be space for visitors to

Julie Golding (19:16.144)
to debrief, to take a rest, to sort of, you know, kind like get you know, real try to recalibrate themselves and and and and refocus.

And there's a lot of different reflection spaces between the heavier parts of the exhibit. and even the way it's designed is that there's within it a core historical exhibition, and within that historical exhibition, the most graphic content is hidden in these little alcoves. So, for example, the images of people

unfortunately jumping from the buildings. Those images are horrible. You know, I remember watching those images that day. They weren't sheltering them that day. They were on the front page of the papers the next morning. But in the museum, they're not right in the space, right as you walk through it. You have to make a real effort to go and see it. And I'll tell you that even in those spaces, they don't actually have the videos of the people falling. They only use still imagery because they felt that it would be too difficult. And

To display these images. They didn't feel that ethically that was the right thing to do. So the people behind the project were incredibly thoughtful in how they designed it. But

There's there's really two parts of this conversation. And I often say, you know, I wrote my book, it's not it's not necessarily for people who are designing the museums, but it's what do you do when the curators have left and the builders have left and suddenly you're left to guide through those spaces and to do something with that space. So it could be a new museum and it could be people who are are working on it, but it could also be, you know, you walk you begin working in a space that

Julie Golding (21:02.73)
You didn't design yourself and suddenly you're coming in and you have to manage that space, guide people through that space. Or it could be a parent or an adult who's taking children through this space or other adults through the space. And thinking about what does it mean to navigate that space, even when it's the very well-designed museum. And I think about the 9-11 museum because I have a terrific example of a student I call Tali. So I met Tali when she was a college age student.

And her, she was Canadian. And when she was 11 years old, her mother had taken her to on a day trip, mother-daughter trip to New York City. And they start the day at the 9-11 museum. And she's 11 years old. Now the museum actually states that not to bring children under the age of 12. They don't recommend children under the age of 12. So her mother shouldn't really have brought her in there. and then

Like any child, like most children, she followed her mother through the exhibit. So her mother goes into all these little alcoves and to all these spaces and she sees everything. Now she said she didn't actually see anything that she hadn't seen before or that she couldn't Google on her own at home. so she doesn't, she felt like the trip itself wasn't that terrible. But afterwards they went for lunch, and after that, they went to the top of the Empire State Building. And at the top of the Empire State Building, she froze.

And her mother said, look out, look out on the observation deck. To which she said, I can't. She just couldn't talk. And she was like, I can't. And she said, till today, she attributes her fear of heights to that visit. She said, We just learned how two tall buildings could fall. And then we went to the top of another one.

And that wasn't a very great idea. And she always said it. She's like, my mother did it backwards. Had we gone first to the Empire State Building, but then gone over to the 9-11 museum, I think I would have been okay. So it's thinking about how do we navigate these spaces? How do we create thoughtful, mindful experiences with whatever there is within this space? So there's really, as I said, two parts to this conversation.

Waitman Beorn (23:15.873)
And I think I mean y one of the words you just used there, I think, is is really important, this idea of of experience, which I think you know can go in in different directions, some good and some bad, right? That that I mean and and one of the things that we've we've sort of almost you know inherently recognized is that most of this is visual. you know, that it's there there is audio elements to it, but

you know, and for the nerds like me, w I will read I will read the text. But you know, I know that when museums design, I was working with Holocaust Museum many years ago, kind of ad advising with a particular exhibit. And, you know, the questions were were first and foremost, what what what visual images do we have? you know, because that that was sort of the the the the the the exhibit was to be built around images rather than text, which you know, we all kind of understand. but how do we

How do we choose those those images? and you know, what what equa what sort of algebra are we doing in terms of balancing

for lack of a better word, emotional impact, with is this kind of necessary or is this good for our our visitors? Because I think that that kind of gets down to sort of the the heart of the challenge here. I think both in in teaching in school and universities, but also, you know, in institutions.

Julie Golding (24:52.066)
So I'll preface my response to that question by pointing out that Holocaust history and is really what I like to call what scholars call difficult history. So not controversial history, but difficult history in that it's challenging for us to teach and to encounter. It sits at that very uncomfortable space of

overwhelming knowledge and it overwhelms the visitor rather than empower them. And it comes from sometimes knowing too much, but not really knowing enough. And I think that sometimes when we look at very graphic images, we get a sense of maybe we can understand some of it, we can normalize some of it, maybe relate it to our own experiences, but then we don't quite know enough about what's going on there.

But these images can be different for each person. So y you were asking about, you know, how do you choose what gets put into a museum? Am I right? Is that the sort of the question here?

Waitman Beorn (25:56.622)
Yeah, I mean that it it's it's that, but it's also and again, the the this is what's fascinating about this whole conversation is that you know, museums all are not are not created equal, right? In the sense that, for example, nine eleven is a museum, but it's also a grave site. It's also like a site of memorial and commemoration, and and not all museums are that. you know, same thing with with the the the Holocaust Museum in in DC, which is a

Julie Golding (26:13.858)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (26:25.325)
Predominantly a museum, but they've created a a memorial space within it, and it's called the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is which is already kind of a choice that suggests a a dual purpose, right? And then you have a place like Auschwitz, which calls itself the Auschwitz Museum, even though it's you know it's really I mean it yes, it's museum, but it's also an actual historical site, right? So so these all these things are kind of competing. And so that means that, you know, some of these places

Holocaust Museum in DC, for example, Auschwitz, you know, they have lots of stuff that they could show. and they make a choice about what what kinds of things, objects, images, video testimony, even text to a certain extent that they're going to to present. So how what is the calculus or how would you comment on sort of this this algebra of like how do we choose something that is going to be, you know

emotionally impactful, but also not sort of voyeuristic or sort of excessive.

Julie Golding (27:33.559)
The first word is audience. When designing an exhibit, you have to think about your audience. So you mentioned the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you mentioned the Auschwitz Museum. And the museums in these different places look very different. As you said, Auschwitz is the site of of Auschwitz, where you know, the largest

Nazi death camp in German occupied Poland, some somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million Jews were murdered on that site. And so

you're showing up at a grieve site and you're showing up at a place where the impact of the site itself is just so powerful. You're walking through spaces where people lived and people were murdered. and there's nothing like standing in the site itself. when you talk about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I will mention they're about to redo the exhibit, so any reflections on the exhibit is going to be on their

current slash almost old exhibit was meant to tell the story of the Americans as the Americans story what did America it opens with seeing what did American soldiers encounter when they arrived in Europe because for visitors showing up at the museum it was a question of well what would you as an American have understood from in that you know have understood about the Holocaust what would you have seen had you shown up there and so the conversation about that is really very important.

And so the objects that get chosen in these spaces are going to reflect the audience that they're talking to. And museums across the United States are going to look different. Museums in the heart of New York, where there's large Jewish communities, versus museums in other places where there isn't a Jewish community is going to look is going to look very different. The other conversation is going to relate to what can

Julie Golding (29:36.557)
People see what is important for them to see to understand it, and what is sort of crossing that line, as you said, of being voyeuristic and just looking at something for the sake of seeing it. one of the important conversations about this happened in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where at the end of the exhibit they debated showing some of the footage of the

what they did with the bodies in Bergenbelsen after the war. and we know there's some very famous footage of these tractors coming and literally pushing the bodies into the graves. And it's really they're horrific and it's it's really hard to watch. And some of the debates you know we sometimes have about that footage is should they have filmed it?

Yes, because they went in there to film and to capture and to show what would happen. You know, we know that Eisenhower walked in and said, pull out the cameras because people are going to deny this one day. but on the other hand, do you show that.

Is that important to show people? so they settled on putting it behind a screen. You kind of have to look over this box in order to look in and see it. You're not going to just encounter that video as you walk through it. Again, goes to the question of, well.

Now do people want to know what's behind that screen and are people going to look at the good stuff behind it? But for the most part, that was really very small criticism when the museum first opened. In general, most people felt that it was very balanced and a good way of handling this.

Julie Golding (31:20.448)
In general, when we teach about the Holocaust, you know, you mentioned that it's often graphic imagery that we're looking at. There's definitely audio as well and a lot of artifacts. I'm a big believer in object-based learning and connecting to the objects, particularly the objects of individuals and what those, what their individual stories are about. And here's where another important part of conversation.

conversation comes in. You see, a lot of times Holocaust museums and organizations will promote the idea of empathy. And empathy is different than sympathy. Sympathy is feeling bad for someone and empathy is a point of connection.

Actually feeling their pain, feeling their feelings. And that's why survivor testimony is so powerful because you can sometimes make a connection more easily with survivor testimony. And the problem with empathy is that sometimes we can empathize too much and we can connect too closely to their story.

For example, I was once working in a Holocaust museum and I had a group of students in the gallery. And I was walking through the museum and I heard some crying coming from a classroom. So I went into the classroom and I found the chaperone, the teacher, crying in the classroom. And I was like, what's going on here? And I said, Are you okay? What's going on? And she said, I can't handle being on this trip. I didn't want to come on this trip, and I can't handle that video.

So I said, which video? Like you're in a Holocaust museum. There's a lot of videos. And she said, the video of the children, the children being taken from their parents. And I thought about it and I said, okay, now it's not particularly graphic in the sense that nobody's getting shot. You're not seeing dead bodies. People aren't being shot into pits. It's not that famous, you know, some of that footage that we do have, a little bit of that footage.

Julie Golding (33:31.893)
But it was images of children, children in the ghetto, and then some still photographs of children being taken out of the Ludge ghetto. And I, as we talked more, she said to me, You know, I'm going through a really difficult divorce, and I'm fighting for custody of my children. And seeing those images of children being taken away from their parents is just too much for me.

And I realized that she was empathizing with that story. She had formed this point of connection. So while that image, and it's it's it's horrible to see images of children in the ghetto and images of the knowledge of children being taken away, someone else might not find that the most quote graphic of images. To her, this was the the hardest, the most difficult image that she was encountering there. So

Thinking about audience, thinking about who's coming to your exhibit is a really important part of it.

Waitman Beorn (34:31.177)
And I mean th th this is a really good point too, because the museums by and large can't really know what things people are bringing with them into the museum. You know, I mean like it's it's slightly different with school groups perhaps, right? Where you could say, you know, we have a we have a population of students that have had a certain experience or we know those particular students, but the general public you know, and I've seen this sometimes too when leading tours of

of Holocaust sites, you know, sometimes something that hits somebody and you're just like, I have no idea why that why that was a thing, right? Or but the person had a very you know, for them a totally reasonable reason why that was the thing that got them or whatever that that upset them. So how do how do museums juggle juggle that with again this sort of and you kinda hinted at it already, th the the basic truth that this is

There are no really great stories, really heartwarming Holocaust stories in general. I mean, you know, yes, you can find some, but but generally speaking, this is going to be traumatic. You know, and and once you've once you're walking in the door at a certain level, you know, buyer beware that you should know what what you're getting into. How do you balance these two things? Of like, you know, maybe maybe you shouldn't go to the museum versus we want you to come to the museum, but we want to make sure that we can have.

protect you as much as possible while remaining sort of faithful to our mission.

Julie Golding (36:04.19)
To come back to that point later that you said about hope, you know, stories of hope and good positive stories in the museum. But let's first talk about what should museums do. I don't want to lose that train of thought over there. what should museums do? And you mentioned classroom educators versus museum docents or gallery educators, and there's a difference there. Because when you teach in the classroom, let's say, like

Waitman Beorn (36:05.697)
Okay, sure.

Waitman Beorn (36:14.007)
Sure. Yeah.

Julie Golding (36:33.032)
my student Rachel or any classroom, you begin to you know your students for the most part. You you you maybe you get to know them over the course of the year. By the time you get to the unit on the Holocaust, you may know something about their background. you can follow up with them. The parents can call you and say, hey, what happened in class? What's going on? But as a museum educator,

You don't get those types of phone calls afterwards. First of all, you don't know who's coming into your space unless you ask. And you don't know how it lands. You sort of it's sort of like you come in, they you teach them an hour, two hours, and then they leave. And it's it's hard to know, and that's why

I think, and also I'll point out that oftentimes, not always, many museums are shifting to more paid gallery educators. But a lot of people who work in these sites are volunteers. So either people who had previous careers and now they just want to volunteer in these spaces, or are even teachers who go into these who go in to volunteer, but they're not necessarily trained as Holocaust educators. And so they they may not.

Have that background knowledge of education or experience of working with students to necessarily pick up on cues of what's going on. And what I really think is important is that museums start to recognize that this is an important part of the experience. So it's not just imparting knowledge, but it's understanding how people receive it.

And so, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of vicarious trauma comes from the field of mental health. And that's where they've looked at well, how are how are therapists affected by hearing stories day in and day out? How are first responders affected by what they encounter when they come to these different sites? So, what's interesting talking about first responders is that

Julie Golding (38:40.396)
internationally in after a natural disaster like a hurricane or or an earthquake or something, about 10 to 15 percent of first responders will leave the field. They're experiencing vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue.

All those words, you know, related to feeling the pain of the other person. And a lot of people really leave the field. I just gave a talk the other day and afterwards, I quoted this statistic, and a woman came up to me afterwards. She said to me, you know, I was a emergency and any emergency medical responder and I used to go out on calls. And one day I came to a house and it was the home of a policeman and he had come home from a very, very

very long shift and he had put his gun up on the shelf and one of his children found the gun and shot the sister. And she said I sat there holding this child, this sister, who died in my arms, and she said I I couldn't go back to that type of work afterwards.

And she said, I never really processed that until you said that there is this statistic of people who actually leave the field because the work itself is so painful, seeing you know the pain of others. And but there's one place that they are doing it differently, and that's actually in Israel. United Hatsalah, which is a volunteer first responder organization.

Established what's a psycho trauma unit that responds alongside medical personnel. When they go out to a medical emergency, someone calls, guys having a heart attack, they respond. Along with the medical team is a psychotra is a therapist who responds. And they treat what they call the silent victim. So not the guy having the heart attack, but let's say the wife sitting on the couch who's experiencing this moment of trauma, who's having a breakdown of

Julie Golding (40:44.994)
Her sense of self, who's having a breakdown of a sense of time, she can't quite make sense of what's going on, and they treat her to try to minimize that trauma that she's experiencing in that moment. And they also treat the first responders themselves. And what's interesting is that a couple years ago there was a religious pilgrimage to Mount Miron, and there was a crowd crush during this religious pilgrimage, and 45 people were killed.

And that night, United Hat Salah treated more than 300 first responders for trauma for the people who had actually responded to this event. And after that event, only two people left the field.

And so we know that the response can be different. It's not necessarily a different event. Of course, every event is different, but we know that there can be a difference. And so museums need to think about what does it mean to treat the people who are coming in and recognize before it actually happens that this is real. And so in my book, I do lay out a framework which is adapted from again the field of mental health called the ABC framework, which is awareness balance.

connection and thinking about different steps that we can take in recognizing how do we help our visitors as they go through these spaces.

Waitman Beorn (42:07.861)
And and what does that look like? what is some examples of sort of, you know, your US HMM or or a Holocaust museum, you know, what is what is what does that look like in in practice?

Julie Golding (42:19.892)
Mm-hmm. In practice, what does that really look like? Okay, so awareness, first of all, is awareness of what are visitors bringing into the space. So start by asking, is there anything we should know about your visitors that may affect them when they come in here? And you know, when I put that into practice in museum spaces, in some other

s cemetery tours, which I'm happy to, you know, tell you the story behind that of a local memorial for for Holocaust victims. I was amazed at some of the answers people gave. And sometimes we would reschedule the tour, cancel the tour, go to different places within the tour. So awareness of what people are bringing in, awareness of the educators themselves, perhaps what they may find difficult about teaching. So maybe it's personal, cultural, political, professional,

And I think educators themselves need to be trained to recognize what's hard for them and what are they themselves bringing into that space. For example, the story that I told you earlier about Tali. So figure out how you're structuring that space. So you're not first visiting the two tall museums that fall and then going to the top of another one. Balance, coping, balance is about coping.

So, coping is the responses that we give when we are overwhelmed. So, what is it that we use to balance ourselves, to maintain equilibrium, when the knowledge is exceeding our ability to really respond to it? And coping is interesting because it doesn't always look the way you're going to expect it to look. So it can look like

Someone's very engaged and asking questions. It can look like someone's disengaged. It can look like humor, cracking jokes. It can look like chewing gum, turning to friends. it it it can it can it can manifest in so many different ways. And each person has different coping styles. And it's important for educators to recognize that people differ cope differently with difficult knowledge. And so

Julie Golding (44:38.072)
one of the most famous examples, I like to give this example, is 1994. A group of students went to visit a screening of Schindler's List. And their teacher took them to see Schindler's List, and they show up at the theater and they sit down and starts showing. And a couple of minutes in, there's some scene, some violent scene, and a student starts to laugh. And soon the students are all laughing in the theater.

The other people in the theater got so upset, they stopped the film, they shut it down, and they had students leave. And this incident garnered national attention. It was reported in the New York Times, it was reported all over, and Steven Spielberg himself went down to visit and talk to the students. But the teacher defended the students, and he said they weren't laughing because they found it funny. They were laughing because they didn't want to show their emotions in front of their peers. And so

People who are in people who are in these spaces need to recognize that what seems like an inappropriate reaction might not actually be an inappropriate reaction. It may just be their way of coping. And so instead of sending them out of space, telling them to be quiet, it's thinking about what tools can I use to engage them. Because our goal in bringing people into these spaces is to engage them. And you know, something that ties into what you mentioned earlier is that people visit for all different reasons.

Most adult visitors will visit because they want to visit. They visit on their own volition. But it really boils down to students who are brought there on field trips and don't necessarily have a choice in coming. And so that's where a lot of these problems will will crop up.

Waitman Beorn (46:23.265)
I mean, I I was gonna ask a c a question 'cause i i it it kind of came up in in the book, you know, where it seems like some of your teaching at least was dealing with Jewish students at at like a Jewish day school or or Hebrew school or whatever. And and I'm curious if if that population offers different challenges in this area, at both ends of the spectrum, right? Like one is sort of the I've been holocausted my entire life.

Like I've heard about this so much that I just it it it goes in one ear and out the other. And the other one is obviously, you know, this is super traumatic for me because because I've heard about this all my life. And I'm I'm curious and you you probably taught in in sort of non Jewish schools as well, you know, how you might compare these two populations. Cause it's kind of it's kind of a good case study in thinking about how do you how do you pitch a tour or how do you curate a visit, knowing who's who's going to be in there.

Julie Golding (47:19.864)
Yeah, it's a great question. And yes, I've worked in Jewish schools for many years, teaching a lot of Jewish students. Many of those students are descendants of Holocaust survivors. And so when I was doing my research, I threw a question in there, just kind of like, Hey, are you a descendant of a Holocaust survivor? And have you ever met a Holocaust survivor? So my s about fifty percent of the students that I ended up surveying at the

museum Jewish Heritage were Jewish and the other fifty percent were not. so and then in my museum work I'd say I've worked more with non Jewish students than with Jewish students, but I've worked with a lot of different audiences in that type of work. And there are differences. And you know, you mentioned earlier like what

we were talking earlier about like age and what can you show to different people and it goes to the question of well at what age are s children coming into these museums? Because, you know, in a classroom, it'll be a little easier for me to give you guidelines on, well, in fifth and sixth grade, here's a great book to read. In seventh and eighth grade, you know, you can start introducing this. don't talk about

mass killings before you hit high school, maybe even upper high school, right? I wouldn't give readings like that in in the lower grades. So that's a little easier, but when you come into a museum, you sort of put these exhibits up and there's a lot of information. And then there's comes this question of how do you guide through it or

Initially, the question of is what age should people be bringing students to these museums? And sometimes that depends on the communities that they come from. So if they're from a community where there are a lot of Holocaust survivors, maybe they grew up with one on every, you know, in their own home, intergenerational, you know, family household, where they know people.

Julie Golding (49:09.852)
they'll be prepared to learn about it at a younger age. students from more inner city spaces where they've encountered a lot of violence will also be, you know, more ready to encounter this information in more of a structured space at a younger age. and some students shouldn't be brought until they're a little older. and at the same time.

You also need to, you mentioned working with Jewish students. Some of them, as you said, were holocausted out was an interesting phrase. there is some overexposure for students who have really learned about it. And what I found sometimes is people appropriating stories of others to themselves. So they'll be like, Well, I grew up with it, so I know so much about it.

What I found is usually people know what they know and then they don't know so much about the rest of it. but they have encountered that information. So it can it can manifest in a lot of different ways, and it's important to recognize what's happening there. So I know I bring an example in my book of a one time I had group of students in an in a gallery, and when they left, I noticed that they someone had left behind this little packet of candies called Udolf.

oodles is like these a little candy packet, you rip it open, and there are a gazillion tiny little balls of candies in there. And if it falls on the floor, trust me, it's a mess to clean it up. but it's called oodles. And the class presidents, I guess the students who had organized the trip to the Holocaust Museum, had given these out as sort of like a souvenir for this visit.

And on it they had put a little sticker that said, Remember the oodles of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. And I remember when I saw this packet and I took a picture of it, I was so taken by it, thinking they really sympathize. Sure, they felt bad that millions of people had been murdered, but they didn't empathize. They didn't connect what we talked about earlier with that idea of empathy.

Julie Golding (51:20.714)
They missed it. And this was a group of students from from a Jewish community who had grown up in a community with a lot of Holocaust survivors. And I always wondered if something there created somewhat of a like a disconnect when they go into a museum of okay, we're remembering, we know it, and we're coming in.

Obviously I never interviewed any of the students on that trip, so I don't actually know what happened. was it related to their age, their grade? But sometimes I attribute it to that. And

On the other hand, you know, I've interviewed some people who have said, I have no interest in going to visit sites in Europe because I grew up with it in my home. And every every holiday party was a Holocaust party because my grandparents sat around and talked about the Holocaust. So there is a sense of I know so much about it and I don't want to know, but there's also a sometimes very often a sense of I know so much and I want to know more.

Sometimes a sense of I know more than you, which is another thing to deal with. But it can come across in a lot of different ways.

Waitman Beorn (52:29.557)
I mean and I think this this is important too because it it speaks to this idea of what is common knowledge, I'm using scare quotes here for the audience, or conventional wisdom about the Holocaust, right? which doesn't always actually line up with the history, right? I mean, like I know when I was a director of museum, you know, we meant some of our docent, you know, they're they were all highly motivated people, you know, many of them retirees and that kind of stuff.

And some of them had what they thought they knew about the Holocaust, and that was and that was their story, you know, and they when they gave it to her, they told sort of the Holocaust as remembered by Doris or whatever, like whatever their name was. Which is not always not always hundred percent accurate. and sometimes that's a result of of all kinds of different elements, right? I mean, I always talk about about Anne Frank, right? you know, her diary is the most famous, it's it's a fantastic resource.

But Anne Frank is not demographically representative of the Holocaust victims. You know, she is she is a relatively non-observant, assimilated, you know, Western European, middle upper middle class Jewish person. And of course, your your sort of standard if if you were gonna average out, you know, your your average Holocaust victim by by demography, it's gonna be a probably relatively relatively more observant.

relatively perhaps less off person from eastern europe, certainly from Eastern Europe, right? Not from not in in in Amsterdam. which is not to say that that that Anne Frank is not super important. It's just that you know because that that source has become famous, it it gets used, you know, and and and people then walk away with an experience with it with an understanding of the Holocaust that oftentimes and I'm beating I'm beating my own drum a little bit here

That often sort of elides the fact that the Holocaust was first and foremost an Eastern European phenomenon, in terms of, you know, masses masses of people. And so I'm curious, you know, how how do we sort of counter that without certainly without sort of minimizing or dismissing the sort of more standard sources, right? because it it speaks again to that idea of sort of

Waitman Beorn (54:54.463)
What do we what do we know and what should we know, which may not be may not always be the same thing?

Julie Golding (55:06.026)
Yeah. so Doris, as you, you know, called it, she knows her story, right? Whoever the Doris is, right? And I think that's why some of the museums are shifting to more paid educators who are trained in the knowledge and know that they don't know and so undergo the training of it. And

I mean, we know we don't have to cite it here, but you know, the Claims Conference did some studies in the last couple of years about what do people know about the Holocaust. And the answers are pretty dismal. They're they're pretty awful. Like we don't really they people don't know very much. And they so many people who can't name a single concentration camp or ghetto, or how many people were murdered in the Holocaust, or

You know, and this is not even to getting into the conversation of Holocaust denial, which is a whole complete other conversation. So we have our work cut out. There's a lot of education that needs to be done. And the baseline knowledge is going to be again goes to audience of the general audience that comes through. What do they know? So where does your starting point have to be? And so

let's say here in the US, I know you're not in the US, but here in the US, we you know, different states will mandate Holocaust education. And so some states and even within those mandates, some places are have better mandates than others and are doing

better, you know, better job at it and and have better guidelines and offer better resources. So it it does boil down to where you are. And students in Europe are going to have a very different understanding than students in the United States.

Waitman Beorn (57:00.011)
And even here in the UK, the Holocaust is the only state mandated topic that must be taught in schools. But again, you know, as you point out, you know, even in a system that's perhaps a little bit more, you know, top down than the US, there's a a huge amount of latitude in what does that look like? Is it is it a mention or two in the course of

a history class is an entire sort of history module in school and and you know the schools are are able to sort of choose, you know, where where they want to go with it. and then in in other places of the world, like I I when I was when I was a grad student and doing research, I was in Freiburg and I I lived with some Germans who were who were super liberal, like, you know, they were not they were not far right people or at all. And we were talking about the Holocaust, you know, and they said we get so much of it.

in school that we don't even know certain things about German history because it gets kind of crowded out with the Third Reich. And and they weren't saying this in the sense of that they they were they were certainly were not saying that the Holocaust wasn't important. They were just saying that it kind of crept over all of the curriculum, you know. So it's so you have you have all these different state sort of interventions about sort of how and much and I'm sure in Israel it's a different, a different it occupies a different space.

in, you know, what it means and what it means for the audience and these kinds of things. So I mean it this seems like a big challenge too is sort of like how do we you know, as you say, audiences come into the museum from a variety of different places.

Julie Golding (58:43.936)
Yeah. So we

I always say Holocaust education is like the wild, wild west. There's no regulation. It looks different in every place. anyone can prop up a shingle and say, I'm now running this Holocaust organization. And it can be about the story of one person's individual, maybe some donor who gave a lot of money, and suddenly there's a whole curriculum and program about it. or it can be the story of a space, it could be

the story of so many different things. So there are some terrific resources out there from some of the larger museums and and programs that work that do a great job. Again, they'll

you really have to think about your audience and which program would work for your audience. And you know, you mentioned you mentioned in England you said this is the only state mandated curricular item and how in Germany, you know, there it's kind of like so much of it going on. Now a couple of years ago I I was working as a curator at the Holocaust Museum here where I live and we were moving the museum from

one site where they had been for the last 30 years to a new space on the local college campus. And I came aboard the project just to the point where I needed to take inventory of the entire collection of artifacts and work with the designers on designing, developing this new museum. So no simple feat, right? And

Waitman Beorn (01:00:22.061)
Yeah.

Julie Golding (01:00:25.216)
As I was going through those collections and those collections and the story of museum collections is a whole other story of the state of museum collections. What are you what can you find in some of these museums? So this museum collection was pretty old. It had been established before the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which meant that local survivors were dropping off objects at the museum's door in the middle of the night, and then they'd wake up the next morning and have these objects and not know where they came from. So very little provenance on the objects.

very little understanding of like where where this came from and then sometimes they'd do the research, sometimes they wouldn't. And as I was going through this collection, I came across a box. Now the box was a small plexiglass box and it had inside what looked like dirt and some twigs. And as I looked at it, I saw there was a sticky note that said Ashes from Helmano.

Julie Golding (01:01:20.662)
And at first I looked at it and I just kind of put it right back on the shelf because, you know, I everyone else before me had done that. And then when I went home that night, I started thinking, you know, this is very strange. Why would we have ashes from Chelno in our collection? Are they really? Now, Chalmno was the first, we mentioned Auschwitz earlier, but Chelno was the first of the Nazi death camps established in German-occupied Poland. And it was a rather primitive site where

Jews were murdered in gas vans, not in gas chambers. And approximately a hundred at least 172,000 Jews were murdered there between 1941 and 1944. And I didn't quite understand why that would be there.

I went back the next day, we started doing the research, we did find some information, we dug into the local newspaper archives, and we found that a survivor had donated this box of ashes from Chalno in the 1990s. And he had given it because he had gone back to Chalmno at some point. His mother and two sisters had murdered in Chalmno, and he gave it to the museum.

Now, most museum collections, and this goes to the conversation of what do museums have, in order to say what they could exhibit. But most museum collections do not, most museums do not accept human remains. Any museum I had worked at beforehand had a clear policy against accepting human remains into the collections. But for some reason, these remains had ended up there. And very long story short, we did the research on it, discovered they were indeed.

Human remains, they were ashes and bone fragments from Helmno. And we decided to have a burial of these ashes. We had a quite a few legal and questions of Jewish tradition, Jewish law that had to be cleared. But eventually we came out that day, and about 500 people came out to bury these remains in the local cemetery here where I live.

Julie Golding (01:03:29.174)
And I remember being at that site, and there were people who came out. There were museum supporters, there were community members, there were people who had lost family members in the Holocaust, and there were some people who had actually lost family members in Hell No. And they came out. And I remember there were literal tears. People were crying at this funeral.

And I really think a lot about the motivations of visitors, why they come out and what does it mean, you know, to be at this site. And then as time went on, what was interesting was that when COVID COVID broke out during the pandemic, museums closed their doors. And

I couldn't bring my own students. I continue till today to teach a twelve group of students, 12th grade students, in a school. And I couldn't bring my own students to a Holocaust museum. So I took them out to this site to start visiting, to visit this Holocaust memorial, figuring it was a good place to social distance. We could stand outdoors and visit someplace. As I mentioned earlier, site-based learning is incredibly powerful.

And that little field trip spiraled into a larger project that I've started today, where we take we take thousands of visitors out to visit this Holocaust memorial here in New York. And it's one of the only places in the United States where victims of the Holocaust are buried. It's a fascinating site. And when you go there, you really think about what is it?

About visiting a Holocaust site, you know, the difference between actually showing up in a site, you know, we're not in Europe, but we do have this site where victims are buried. and what does it mean for people to encounter this site? It's different than a museum where it's a more immersive experience and there are images coming at you, video testimony coming at you, artifacts coming at you. here it's quiet, it's in the middle of a cemetery.

Julie Golding (01:05:25.072)
And what's difficult knowledge there is just the knowledge of who these people could w were, what they could have become, the loss of potential, the potential of their lives of who they could have become, and the horrific tragedy that befell them and the rest of European Jewry. So sometimes it's not just the images, but sometimes it's the knowledge itself that can be overpowering.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:53.698)
Yeah, I mean I I I've definitely had this and witnessed this experience as well. I mean, I I went on a as a grad student, I went on this this study trip and and and one of the stops was Auschwitz and it was this this the students in the study trip were all graduate students, all focused on the Holocaust. And one of them had r exactly their their reaction that you were talking about. Like she was just had the giggles. You know, and and this is not a person that was you would ever think had, you know, any irreverent

you know, thoughts about the Holocaust, but that was how they they happened to to interact with it. And I I I think one of the things that that's also interesting to sort of go along with what you just mentioned, is you know, I I used to lead a a group of students on a two week Holocaust trip in in in Europe as well, in Poland. And one of the things that we always had to to impress upon them was like there's no right right way to react.

I mean there there is a there are boundaries of how to behave, you know, but we weren't worried about that. It's more like you don't need to feel like you have to perform your experience. You know, it's gonna hit everybody in a different way, or not at all in a certain sense, and and that's okay too. but I think it's really interesting, you know, in l in line with some of the things you've been talking about is sort of this this sense of like I should be feeling something.

And I don't, which I've had lots of students say to me, you know, because we one of the things that this this study trip did that that's I think really good and probably models some of the things that you're talking about is we would always have like a little get together every day at the end of the day where people would we would just talk and sort of share, like, well, what what you what struck you or what question it could be it could be, you know, asking me as the expert historical questions. It could also just be I felt this or I saw that, or I saw people behaving in this way.

Which I think is really is really useful. But I've had lots of people sort of say, like, I kind of feel bad that I don't feel bad, if that makes sense. Like it and again, not because they don't care, but but because either they saw some people having a really, you know, significant kind of emotional response, or because they felt like they had to, you know, and they were almost beating themselves up because they didn't have sort of this, you know.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:16.627)
normative or whatever they imagine to be the normative response that when you go to Auschwitz you just sort of break down the tears or whatever. And I wonder if you had that experience too in in in working with students in the museums about sort of which which also kind of again again circling back to the very beginning of our conversation, you know, is that something the museums are in some ways trying to trying to get people to sort of have this emotional reaction at the same time?

Julie Golding (01:08:42.188)
They are. And going back to that point, museums work this, this, they walk a fine line between telling the story accurately and trying to affect visitors. And you want to affect visitors, but to a point that you don't overwhelm visitors. And you mentioned you you kind of set it off the cuff, but I'm gonna give a little more

Credibility to what you just mentioned. He said, we had these little gatherings at the end of the day just to talk about what happened. I'll tell you that the third piece of this ABC framework is the idea of connection. One of the things we can do as we bring people into these spaces is to foster connection. Now, connection can be pure connections. In trauma, they find that.

Connection is a very crucial part of healing. So knowing that somebody went through something is incredibly powerful, empowering, and knowing that somebody went through it and they're okay afterwards. So connections with peers can be connections, as you mentioned, with educators, having the chance to talk about it, really giving the time to talk about this is what you, this is what you, you know.

could be feeling is normal, normalizing things, discussing what happened. And I know one tour guide who I interviewed who said that he takes student groups to Poland and at the end of the day he does not give out the room keys until they've had a debriefing session. Because he doesn't want anybody going back into their room to process Ashwitz, Maidonics, Maidonic, Belgians, whatever it is, on their own.

Want to make sure you're processing together. connection can be connection to survivor stories. When we teach about the Holocaust, we we often try to tell the story of one because six million is so overwhelming. Six to eight million is so overwhelming. It's really hard to comprehend that number. We can't. Our minds just can't. And so we often tell the story of one. What was one person?

Julie Golding (01:10:54.774)
What did they go through? And again, those stories of individuals will differ based on the museum. They'll choose local survivors who ended up in the community. I was just last week out at the Zeckelman Center in Detroit, a focus on telling local survivor stories, which I think is really powerful. And so that can be a local connection. Someone might say, Hey, I know that person. And obviously, as we get into as we transition from an

era of lived memory to one of historical memory. And as you know, we're unfortunately getting to the close of being able to hear survivor testimony firsthand, the field is grappling with so many questions of how do we continue to foster those connections because survivor testimony is so powerful.

when we're not going to have the survivors around. And so there's a huge idea of, you know, creating, capturing their stories, whether it's through holograms, whether it's through AI, whether it's through recordings, and and people are really grappling in the field or doing tremendous work in how do we continue to tell these stories? And what is going to be the best way to tell these stories to cultivate those types of connections that we were just talking about, because they are very strong and they are really powerful.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:15.127)
I mean I'm curious i I as you sort of introduced it there, you know, the future the future of museums, right? y you know, and the digital is is is part of that, right? I mean like full disclosure, one one of the projects that I'm working on now is a is a a 3D digital reconstruction of of the camp that I wrote my my most recent book on, you know, that's going to allow for virtual tours where you interact with primary sources at different sort of stops on the tour buildings.

that we've recreated because the camp itself doesn't exist. And and I'm curious i how the digital, not even you know, sort of a virtual reality or or virtual visit, but just the digital in general poses a challenge to

Waitman Beorn (01:13:03.469)
treating students trauma because there's you know there is so much on the internet and we're I'm I'm just talking about the good stuff, like the the the the historically accurate Holocaust stuff, but we can leave the rest of of it for another conversation. But just, you know, you know, so many amazing Holocaust sites and museums have material on the internet that's really good. but also it can be really challenging and really troubling. And

Julie Golding (01:13:16.877)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:34.006)
You know, I'm thinking of of of sort of the the digital example of the analog example that your tour guy was talking about of like not letting them go back to the rooms by themselves. You have people that are just engaging with this material by themselves. You know, I'm sitting at home in my in my bedroom, you know, looking at Holocaust material or, you know, listening to testimony for a paper or something, you know, and and I'm curious, you know, on the w it it's kind of again, it it's it like everything else in this conversation, it's kind of a double edged sword. On the one hand it's it's

It's democratizing and it's great that we have all this information out there, provided it's, you know, as I've described from you know professional academically rigorous sources, that's great. but on the other hand, it means that, you know, people can ex can imbibe it in a variety of different ways, that may not be healthy both intellectually or or emotionally for them, but also for the for the future of the history itself.

Does that make sense? I mean, like I I feel like this is one of the as an historian, this is one of the challenges that I I I get I get I'll I'll I'll I'll mention it this way. I I have a Google alert for Yanofska camp, because that's the book I wrote that the camp wrote a book on. And so anytime anything about Yonovska comes up, I get an alert because I've I've always been curious. Last ten years I've been curious what what what's coming out. And now all I get are Facebook. It's Facebook posts of AI generated images and videos.

Where they've lifted the text from my work or somebody else's. You know, they've picked some of the the stories, you know, and it's out there. And we're and we're we're reaching a stage where, you know, if I wanted to, I could create false traumatic Holocaust images or video, you know, of the Holocaust. And and it's just out there for anybody to kind of engage with. And at a certain point, you know, the at least the visual stuff.

it may be indistinguishable from you know from actual stuff, you know, because I again with the example that I'll be quiet, but the example that w you know, I'm talking about, I'm not gonna say that I've seen every photograph taken of Yunovska, but it's not a very well known place. And I feel like I've probably seen most of them that are accessible. You know, and so I can recognize that like that's garbage. You know, not just based on the fact that you know the women have long hair and are, you know, relatively fit and and you know not

Julie Golding (01:15:52.056)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:02.699)
Bone skinny, etcetera. but at a certain point, y you know, we won't we won't be able do that. Yeah, and and it's just gonna be and then it gets shared and shared and eaten and eaten and regurgitated. I'm sorry, I sound really pessimistic now, don't I? But but

Julie Golding (01:16:16.696)
No, I think you asked two questions in one from what I was hearing. One was that question that I don't think we should get too deeply into because we'll be sitting here for a lot longer, is is the use of AI generated images and the damage that it's doing in, you know, for the field of forget everything else, but for the field of Holocaust studies and Holocaust education. And

Waitman Beorn (01:16:21.525)
Yeah. Go for it. Go for it.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:29.143)
Right.

Yeah.

Julie Golding (01:16:44.106)
as you mentioned, you know, if you're coming across these images, you know, no one's regulating them. They're just popping up. How are we going to say this happened when there's so much now that's pictured in images that didn't happen, right? So this is a huge challenge for confronting Holocaust denial and all that. But I I just don't think we can answer that on on one leg. I don't think anybody can answer that right now. I think we're all struggling. Everyone in the field is struggling with this question.

The question I think you asked first was like, what do I do if I'm sitting in my house and I'm coming across these images? What is it that I, you know, what do I it's all out there and there's a lot of graphic imagery out there on the internet. And, you know, first of all I'll say read the book because I do give some tips on on what to do. And again, really called from other fields where they think about this more, from, you know, forensic investigators who have to think about

Looking at images and studying in images deeply of some very disturbing graphic material. And so, what are some of the tips that are given to people to do this? and thinking about I I definitely I I believe strongly in Holocaust education. I think it's really important for different audiences for different reasons. And so we need to talk about it. I make a case, you know, for.

we're showing these images, how do we do it in a safe way? How do we bring people safely in and safely out of those spaces? And thinking about what is it that we want them to gain from it. And, you know, the flip side of vicarious trauma is vicarious resilience. And I think that, you know, as part of this whole conversation in saying, you know, if we have

The capacity, if we have the ability to absorb someone else's pain, we also have the ability to absorb their strength and to absorb their power, their resilience. And so resilience is an interesting thing. So Victor Frankel defines resilience. He says that resilience is when we can no longer change a situation. We're challenged to change ourselves.

Julie Golding (01:19:05.692)
And that's what resilience really is. It's like you can't do anything about it. People who were in the Holocaust, they were in a situation of choiceless choices, right? They couldn't do anything about the situation that they were in for the most part. But the choices that they made, despite you know what Linger refers to, Lawrence Lang refers to as choiceless choices, were sometimes pretty incredible.

Right. So there's a famous story of, you know, when you enter into the gates of Auschwitz, there's a famous sign that says Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free. Right. And this sign was meant to make a joke, to make a mockery of the people who are arriving, and to say, if you work hard, you're gonna get out of here. And we know that wasn't the case. It wasn't a matter of working hard was gonna get you a a ticket out of there.

and what's fascinating, and basically any tour guide who guides people through this space will stand beneath the sign and will point out something pretty incredible. Because the workers who forged that sign, who forged that metal sign, they created, they did something fascinating. They took the letter B and they inverted it. They flipped it backwards, upside down.

And they did that as a sign of courage, of resistance, of strength. And so anyone who came through would see that sign and would recognize that act of defiance. And visitors who come today see it, and they they get to absorb that message till today, that message of vicarious resilience, of

They experienced this, they left this message for me, and I too can see it today. And I know my daughter was just visiting Auschwitz in the last couple of weeks, sent me a picture of the of the letter B, which now stands alone, an inverted B, which people are now using as these monuments because this B has become such a powerful symbol. But I I think we need to think about it as not just the

Julie Golding (01:21:17.634)
Famous, you know, like a big you don't have to go to Auschwitz to hear that story. You know, you mentioned you've worked in a, you know, in a local small smaller, more local Holocaust museum as I do. there's quite a few Holocaust museums in different places or memorials. And we have those opportunities to tell stories of resilience.

in so many different ways. And this goes back to what we spoke about earlier, of like, there's barely any positive messaging that can be gleaned from the story of the Holocaust. But

I think there I think there is, and I think there's a lot that people can draw from it. And I'll tell you, you know, I mentioned that today I bring people out to the Chalno Memorial here in New York, here in Rockland County. And so we go to visit the Holocaust Memorial, and there's really nothing positive about that story. I mean, these Jews were murdered in Chalno.

Chalmno, they were crushed, they were destroyed, their bodies were were were burned in an open air pit. And I mean, Khalno like I think maybe there were seven survivors of Chalmno, I forget the exact number, but it's really awful. I don't know many positive stories. But another thing I do, and I've incorporated the visit to this memorial as part of a larger two-hour tour.

Where we visit other survivors, where we visit survivors who are buried in the local cemetery. And those survivors, some of their stories are incredible. And we visit some more well-known people who are buried there and some lesser-known people. For example, the story of a woman who's buried there who was a doctor in the Ludge Ghetto. And when the Nazis came to round up the children,

Julie Golding (01:23:00.824)
She made a choice. She risked her life and took those children, wrapped them in blankets, and threw them out a window and said, run away. Had the Nazis caught her, she would have been killed on the spot. But she wanted to do what she could to try to give those children a chance to survive. And so, I mean, that was probably a a split-second decision on her part. At the same time, choices like that.

They don't come from nowhere. They come from training ourselves to be moral, upstanding human beings, to make those types of choices so that when we're in a situation, a difficult situation, and it should never be as difficult as something like the Holocaust, we too can.

Come through with like bright, shining colors. We should be able to come through those moments, having learned about these stories of resilience and of strength and of courage and

experience that vicariously and then we too can take that into our own lives for whatever choices and and moments and situations that we have. And so I think that's really a tremendous power of Holocaust education. There's a lot of debate today is Holocaust education working? Is it not working? We're pouring millions of dollars into Holocaust education. Do we continue to preserve, to conserve the sites? And these are all important conversations. I think ultimately it really boils down to

We are humans, we have the ability for choice, we have the capacity for choice, and we need to recognize what we're doing. And from there, using that same understanding, and educators can use this to cultivate if I'm aware, if I can recognize what my students are doing, and then I can, if they're not balanced, if they're trying to find balance, if I can bring them back into the space, instead of saying, You're not behaving, leave, go wait in the front and you'll join your class when you're finished, or leave the movie theater, or whatever.

Julie Golding (01:25:03.294)
that might be, and forming those connections, we have an incredible power to make a difference in this world by continuing to tell the story of the Holocaust.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:14.317)
I I I think it's wonderful. I mean that's a that's a great that's a great place to end on as well. You know, that the there are there are sort of positive lessons, you know, and I will I you know, I I would be remiss because I'm the cynical old historian as well to you know, if I also don't point out something you point out the book as well, you know, which is which is that we as humans tend to have tend to imagine ourselves in the role of the victims and the and the rescuer and the resister rather than as the bystander and the perpetrator.

You know, which is which is a again, like that that is a I think that's a challenge too, you know, in in in education, which is that, you know, you know, statistically speaking, we're far more likely to to to be a a bystander or or you know, or responsible in some way, shape or form, or supportive of the regime, as it were, you know, than than not, right? And that th that there's a reason why those people who resist are heroic, you know, they're they're extraordinary people. That's that

Because they've done something out of the ordinary that other folks haven't had. you know, but your your point is absolutely one hundred percent well taken, you know, that that you know, the stories in in fact every survivor story has elements of that in it, just by nature of the of the horror historical event. You know, most people did not survive. And so people that did survive, you know, did so or were rescued, you know, somebody helped them or they helped somebody else or they made a an incredible choice or

Julie Golding (01:26:28.801)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:26:42.133)
series of choices or whatever to to overcome overcome some a situation that was forced upon them. you know.

Julie Golding (01:26:49.474)
The decision to rebuild is so powerful. The choice to rebuild after what people went through is in and of itself just heroic.

And you know, for people to pick themselves up after having lost their entire, entire family, is their entire community. They could be sole survivors from their entire community. three of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. And while I I've approached it today in in my book, really looking at

the you know the research and trying to understand the broader story and not for people who are not necessarily descendants of Holocaust survivors. And I think that's what the field does need going forward is more research and understanding of what are we doing and what are the best practices for doing this. So we're not in a situation of the wild, wild west. We need to look at those stories. So whether they're local stories in your communities or family stories, we need to keep we need to keep telling.

those stories and focusing on on the power of rebirth, no matter what they went through during those actual years. The their choice to rebuild, their choice to start life new is is incredible.

Waitman Beorn (01:28:04.973)
Well, and th and this is a great point as well, to sort of conclude with, because it it is an area that I think, thankfully, Holocaust education and Holocaust studies has go has embraced, which is that the Holocaust isn't an event that that runs from nineteen thirty-three to nineteen forty-five and then stops. I mean it it it it continues both sort of in physical, actual things people have to do terms, but also in, as you say, sort of the the mental and the coming to terms and the build and the rebuilding and all of that.

know it it it it it extends ultimately in into the present. You know, it's it's it's it's a it's a much longer thing and it's not just in this event that, you know, that you know liberation and then the the bell is rung and then everything is sort of okay. but before we let you go, I want to ask the question that I I always ask, which is, what is one book on the Holocaust that you'd recommend for our listeners at this particular moment in time?

Julie Golding (01:28:47.704)
Mm.

Julie Golding (01:29:02.024)
At this particular moment in time. So one of my favorite books is called The Book Smugglers by David Fishman. it's a story of how a group of people, the paper brigade, tried to rescue they rescued the

incredible library of Jewish books and manuscripts in the city of Vilna. And a couple of years ago, I curated an exhibit called Sacred Scrolls of the Holocaust, where I looked at what happened to the various scrolls, Torah scrolls, Mezuzot, Tefillin, and during the Holocaust, and the story of these Jewish scrolls and objects.

very much mirrors the lives of their owners. So you get to look at like the pre-war Jewish life, the going into hiding, those that were destroyed, those that came out, and as we talked talked about, the rebuilding of them. So the decision to write new scrolls afterwards.

is is incredibly powerful. I love that exhibit. And in the book smugglers, you get to really explore the deeper story of what it meant to rescue these books and to rescue these scrolls. And you know it also ties a little bit into our conversation about graphic imagery because the scrolls, you know, the destroyed Torah scrolls, the destroyed manuscripts, they're not the dead bodies on the ground.

But when you learn the backstory of it, that knowledge is just so incredibly powerful. it you realize that it doesn't always take a graphic image to tell the story. There's so many parts of it, so much nuance, so much depth that has to be told. And it's not simply about showing up as an educator, you know, flashing lots of really awful images on a screen for your students and then walking out of there. It's about telling the depth of the story, the beauty of the lives lived.

Julie Golding (01:30:55.446)
and the fight to survive and the fight to rebuild afterwards.

Waitman Beorn (01:31:00.029)
That's that's that's an excellent way to put it. And then I'm gonna put that now on my list. Maybe we'll get David on on the podcast because I wasn't I was not aware of this book. I was aware I was aware of there for I'm this is Yvo, right? the the r rescuing Yvo. so I mean I'm I'm familiar with it, but I didn't realize it was a book, so I'm gonna I'm gonna get this. everybody else, thank you so much for listening. There is a lot more in the book as well, things we didn't get a chance to cover.

Julie Golding (01:31:07.256)
I hope so.

Julie Golding (01:31:12.352)
Yeah, it it had to do with Evo and rescuing the books and

Okay, highly recommend.

Waitman Beorn (01:31:28.427)
because Julie has covered lots of really important stuff in the book that we didn't get to. but thank you for listening. and again, if you are if you're finding this this podcast useful, engaging, you know, drop me a line, give us a like, a subscribe, all those, all those things. and again, Julie, thanks so much for coming on and and talking about this a really, really nice discussion of of a difficult topic.

Julie Golding (01:31:50.999)
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.