Lynette Burt admits her family was apprehensive when she told them she would be spending the first three weeks of 2017 in Israel.
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The Middle-Eastern nation has been a constant site of conflict for more than half a century, yet when Mrs Burt won a scholarship to attend an 18-day course at the International School for Holocaust Studies, she knew she had to go.
The Port Dalrymple School assistant principal was one of 35 Australian teachers and only two Tasmanians who attended the conference at the world’s biggest holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.
Situated atop the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is an 18-hectare complex which houses museums, memorial sites, a research institute and the ISHS.
The ISHS formed the group’s home base for the majority of the conference, with most days packed with lectures from 8.30am to 5pm.
Returning to George Town in late January ahead of another school year, Mrs Burt insists the trip was “personally and professionally life-changing”.
“I'd be advocating that it goes on anyone's bucket list to go, just with the religious history, the temples and the old city, but there's also that multiculturalism too,” Mrs Burt said.
“If we keep thinking that nothing’s going to be safe we're never going to experience anything – they wouldn’t be taking 35 educators if they didn't believe it was safe.”
Funded by Gandel Philanthropy - one of Australia’s biggest philanthropic trusts - the annual conference featured a lineup of world-class lecturers as well as six holocaust survivors.
Mrs Burt said her highlight of the trip was meeting Eva Rac-Lavi – one of about 1200 Jews to be saved by German factory owner Oskar Schindler; a story which has since been immortalised in the 1993 film Schindler’s List.
“We went to where (Schindler) was buried and Ewa spoke about what he did for her.
“She was one of a group of females who was sent to Auschwitz and he actually went in and said ‘I want my Jews back, I need these Jews to clean ammunition and pots; these hands aren't hands, they're resources for the war effort’, so he got this group of people back and at the end of the war they were liberated.”
“We also heard from Dr Efraim Zuroff, also known as the Nazi Hunter, who is still tracking down Nazis to have them tried under war crimes, and we had the opportunity to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister’s head communicator speak on issues within Israel today.
“One of the speakers was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize - we had the best of the best.”
Since returning from the trip, Mrs Burt has set about planning how she will implement the skills she has learned into the classroom.
One of the conference’s key teachings – the ‘safely in, safely out’ philosophy - will form the foundation of how she teaches the holocaust moving forward.
“As you immerse students in holocaust education it has to be done safely because of the confronting content, so that ‘safely in, safely out’ was something they modelled the whole way through (the conference).
“The idea was that as much as we were confronted by what we saw and what we heard, we always exited the class and the lecture in a manner that made us feel a little bit more at ease and with some understanding.”
Mrs Burt said it was important not to focus solely on the war’s death toll, but to broadly examine the perpetrators, bystanders, victims and heroes involved.
“We can give facts, figures, dates and numbers - six million Jews died in the holocaust - but it’s not until you understand that each of the six million individuals have a story that shows resilience, courage and sacrifice that you can truly recognise their role in ensuring the continuance of the Jewish faith.”
With World War II more than 70 years in the past, formal education will be crucial to ensuring the war’s events are not forgotten by the next generation.
Even more important is helping students to learn life lessons from the war.
“If we're teaching holocaust education the purpose is to properly ensure that history doesn't repeat itself and that students understand they have a responsibility in society to make the right choices.
“Something that one of the lecturers said one day was that the opposite to good is not evil, it's indifference and I just thought ‘that's the thing we've got to get through to students’.
“It’s about accepting and taking responsibility, making positive choices and making ethical decisions.
“That history concept of learning from the past to shape the future was something that was a throughline all the way through - if you're not developing moral and ethical people, what is society going to look like in the future?”
Inspired by the trip and the prospect of another school year, Mrs Burt is determined to spread her new-found knowledge as widely as she possibly can.
“My responsibility as an educational leader is to share this with other teachers and make sure that it's not just with my class here, so I’ll spread this and do some professional learning about how to teach holocaust education.”