Onur looks intently at the photomontage. From all the famous news images, he picks one: New York’s World Trade Center aflame. “Did you know that the Jews were warned before to get out?” he whispers. “I read it on the Internet.”
Onur, 15, and his classmates are participating in a weeklong educational program at the Wannsee House Memorial and Educational Center, the site where Nazi leaders in 1942 worked out their genocidal plan for the Jews. Wannsee House is one of many institutions in Germany today trying to counter antiSemitism and Holocaust denial, particularly among Muslim youths.
Teachers across Germany say they face a special challenge from those of immigrant backgrounds, most of whom are Muslims. Disenfranchised from the mainstream, many of these students echo anti-Semitic attitudes heard at home, trade schoolyard insults about Jews or express Holocaust denial, testing German taboos. “There is a problem, but you cannot quantify it,” says Micha Brumlik, professor of pedagogy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. “I have heard so many teachers say that when they have eyewitnesses of the Holocaust at their schools, parents excuse their children and say they are sick. And the same happens when classes are going to visit the information center at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial or Jewish museums.”
