[Milliways]: Teaching the Holocaust

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It's Hector's classroom, but it isn't Hector's class. They're sat in a circle, and that is not Hector's formation. It's Irwin's.

Collaboration is likely too strong, too cohesive a word for what they're doing, and that uncertainty, that devisiveness bleeds into the demeanor of the boys.

Hector's boys.

Irwin's boys.

(Posner isn't sure where he falls anymore.)

"Would you like to start?" Irwin asks, accepting his place as the visitor but also stealing the opening, offering the start as though it were his to offer.

"I don't mind," Hector responds, nonchalant, falsely casual.

There's a moment's awkward silence.

"How do you normally start? It is your lesson. General Studies." Posner has to wonder if Irwin knows that the title of the class is itself a dig in Hector's direction.

"The boys decide. Ask them." It's true, yes, but it's also Hector being sullen, sulking and refusing to play.

In apparent exasperation, Irwin turns to the boys, then. "Anybody?"

Comments

[pushtheboatout]

There's silence. The boys look at each other, at their feet.

Finally Hector says, "Come along, boys, don't sulk," and Dakin must speak rather than be accused of sulking.

It's his place to explain, really.

"We don't know who we are, sir. Your class or Mr. Irwin's."

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"Does it matter?" Irwin asks, and Posner can't believe he could really be so naive.

"Oh, yes, sir," Timms responds. "It depends if you want us thoughtful. Or smart."

"He wants you civil, you rancid little turd," Hector comments, almost no acid in the insult, though Timms is rewarded with the thwap of a rolled up paper on his head.

"Look, sir!" Timms complains to Irwin. "You're a witness. Hitting us, sir. he could be sacked."

[pushtheboatout]

"Settle down, settle down," says Irwin. Odd to cast him as the peacemaker, thinks Dakin, when he's the one upsetting the natural order. "I thought we'd talk about the Holocaust."

"Good gracious," responds Hector. Is that on the syllabus?"

"It has to be. The syllabus includes the Second World War."

"I suppose it does," says Hector.

"Though in any case the scholarship questions aren't limited to a particular curriculum," Irwin adds.

"But how can you teach the Holocaust?" says Hector, which Dakin can understand: something so enormous has no place in the subjunctive.

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Posner is torn and a bit disturbed. To see something like the Holocaust ripped apart by Irwin's methods could be as useful as he's certain it will be upsetting.

"Well, that would do as a question," Irwin argues. "Can you...should you...teach the Holocaust? Anybody?"

"It has origins," Akthar offers. "It has consequences. It's a subject like any other."

Posner is all to glad Scripps jumps in with, "Not like any other, surely. Not like any other at all." It saves him feeling like he has to.

"No," agrees Akthar. "But it's a topic."

[pushtheboatout]

Hector muses, "They go on school trips nowadays, don't they? Auschwitz, Dachau. What has always concerned me is where do they eat their sandwiches? Drink their Coke?"

"The visitors' centre," says Crowther. "It's like anywhere else."

"Do they take pictures of each other there?" Hector continues. "Are they smiling? Do they hold hands? Nothing is appropriate. Just as questions on an examination paper are inappropriate.

"how can the boys scribble down an answer however well put that doesn't demean the suffering involved?"

Ah. The heart of the matter.

"And putting it well demeans it as much as putting it badly."

"It's a question of tone, surely," Irwin says. "Tact."

"Not tact. Decorum."

Lockwood says, "What if you were to write that this was so far beyond one's experience silence is the only proper response," and there's a small wave of assent among the other boys.

Dakin says, "That would be your answer to lots of questions, though wouldn't it, sir?"

"Yes," says Hector. "Yes, Dakin, it would."

"'Whereof one cannot speak therof one must be silent,'" says Dakin, throwing out his gobbet. It has the unexpected effect of making Hector put his head in his hands. "That's right, isn't it, sir? Wittgenstein."

"Yes," says Irwin. "That's good."

"No, it's not good," retorts Hector. "It's...flip. It's...glib. It's journalism."

"But it's what you taught us!" Dakin protests.

"I didn't teach you and Wittgenstein didn't screw it out of his very guts in order for you to turn it into a dinky formula. I thought you of all people were bright enough to see that."

Dakin says, not to be a smart alec like Irwin may think, not to be the golden boy, "I do see it, sir. Only I don't agree with it. Not...not anymore."

There. It's out.

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Posner has to wonder if Hector's head doesn't stay in his hands because he's lost Dakin, because Dakin is now, without doubt, one of Irwin's boys.

"Sir," Timms interjects.

"Yes?" Hector asks, through his hands.

"You told us once...it was to do with the trenches, sir...that one person's death tells you more than a thousand. When people are dying like flies you said, that is what they are dying like."

It's uncharacteristically thoughtful of Timms, and Posner would pay more attention to that fact if he weren't to the point where he can no longer be silent himself.

"Except that these weren't just dying," he argues, struggling to keep himself in check, to maintain the distance Irwin is always lecturing them about. "They were being processed. What is different is the process."

He comes quite close to groaning in frustration when Irwin responds with, "Good."

[pushtheboatout]

"No," says Hector, "not good. Posner is not making a point. He is speaking from heart."

"So?" Dakin says. "Supposing we get a question on Hitler and the Second war and we take your line, sir, that this is not a crazed lunatic but a statesman."

It's not personal toward Posner. It's about passing the exam.

"A statesman?" Hector cries.

"Not a statesman, Dakin," Irwin says. "A politician. I wouldn't say statesman."

"Politician, then," Dakin says, accepting the difference, "And one erratically perhaps, but still discernibly operating within the framework of the traditional German foreign policy..."

"Yes?" Irwin says.

"...and we go on to say, in accordance with this line, that the death camps have to be seen in the context of this policy."

There is a pause.

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A pause in which Posner emits a soft, strangled noise, shocked into silence by the idea that someone, anyone, but most especially someone he knows (loves) could even suggest such a thing. Exam or no.

"I think that would be...inexpedient," Irwin finally manages.

"Inexpedient?" Hector exclaims. "Inexpedient?"

"I don't think it's true, for a start." Posner will credit Irwin for that, if only a little.

"But what has truth got to do with it?" asks Scripps. "I thought that we'd already decided that for the purposes of this examination truth is, if not an irrelevance, then so relative as just to amount to another point of view."

"Why can you not simply condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?" Hector says, posing the only obvious, the only possible--so far as Posner can see--answer.

The boys look around at each other as though embarrassed at having to decline the correct response.

[pushtheboatout]

"No point, sir," says Lockwood at last. "Everybody will do that. That's the stock answer, sir ... the camps an event unlike any other, the evil unprecedented, etc., etc."

Hector says, "No. Can't you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazis would have said, the dead reduced to a mere verbal abbreviation. What have we learned about language? Orwell. Orwell."

"All right," says Lockwood, "not etcetera. But given that the death camps are generally thought of as unique, wouldn't another approach be to show what precedents there were and put them ... well ... in proportion?"

"Proportion!" exclaims Scripps.

"Not proportion, then," says Dakin, "but putting them in context."

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Posner jumps on that comment, again unable to keep silent. "But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away."

"'Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner,'" Rudge contributes. To understand everything is to forgive everything.

Hector lets out the groan Posner feels.

"That's good, Posner," Irwin offers, and for a moment, Posner hates him.

"It isn't 'good'. I mean it, sir."

[pushtheboatout]

Dakin frowns. Don't they all see it's just playing the game?

He says, "But when we talk about putting them in context it's only the same as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. After all, monasteries had been dissolved before Henry VIII, dozens of them."

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Posner has tried so hard to do just that, to play Irwin's game. Whatever it takes to get him into Oxford, but this? This is just so hard.

"Yes," he snaps. "But the difference is, I didn't lose any relatives in the Dissolution of the Monasteries."

[pushtheboatout]

"Good point," says Irwin, delighted at the debate.

"You keep saying 'Good point,'" says Scripps. "Not good point, sir. True. To you the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may get a question."

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"No. But this is history. Distance yourselves," Irwin says, as though this helps anything at all.

"Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past and one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be...even the Holocaust."