Participants in a conference on education about the Holocaust on Monday pointed to the need to consistently remove online hate speech, noting that children cannot learn about the Holocaust in schools while growing up surrounded by messages of intolerance and discrimination.

The international conference, focusing on new approaches to the legacy of and education about the Holocaust, was held in Zagreb on the occasion of the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism and the 82nd anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom. The event was organised by the Documenta nongovernmental organisation with the support of the US Embassy and the Europe for Citizens Programme and the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency.

Deputy Public Ombudswoman Tena Simonovic Einwalter said that apart from learning about the Holocaust, also important was education about human rights and tolerance as was serious work on eliminating hate speech, discrimination and hate crimes, which, she said, also refers to politicians and public figures, as their statements have an impact on children and young people.

She therefore called for consistently removing hate content from the web and the media, efficiently suppressing discrimination and efficiently prosecuting those responsible for it.

Simonovic Einwalter also called for clear messages from the highest officials and joint action by decision-makers, teachers and civil society organisations.

Special US envoy: Ethnic and racial hate still present around the world

US Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Cherrie Daniels said that lessons to be learned from the Holocaust were important as ethnic and racial hatred was still present around the world while the awareness of the Holocaust was not at a desired level.

The lack of understanding is becoming an increasingly big problem because we have lost the first generation of the Holocaust survivors, which has made it more difficult to establish a relationship to the legacy of the past, while some governments are showing a tendency to distort history, Daniels said, noting that this was why recommendations for teaching and learning about the Holocaust were drawn up in Luxembourg in 2019.

Education about the Holocaust differs from country to country but everyone should focus on creating the political will and allocating resources to deal with the problem, she said.

PM sent a strong message

Daniels stressed that an exhibition on the Holocaust in Croatia in the 1941-1945 period, opened in Zagreb in February, was a major contribution speaking about the history of the Independent State of Croatia and the 40,000 Jews killed or sent to concentration camps by the Ustasha regime.

She said that PM Andrej Plenkovic sent a strong message at the opening of the exhibition, saying that those crimes were a warning to the world and that to forget them would be a crime against humanity.

A State Secretary at the Science and Education Ministry, Ivana Franic, said that Croatia had made big progress in education about the Holocaust, including a recommendation to all schools to organise visits to the WWII Jasenovac concentration camp, a programme financed by the ministry, as well as the ministry’s decision to finance the participation of Croatian students in international programmes.

The head of the Jasenovac Memorial Centre, Ivo Pejakovic, said that over the past few years talks had been held with the aim of having student visits to Jasenovac financed by the Science and Education Ministry and not their parents, which had been the case until now.

From the start of this year to March, some 50 schools expressed a wish to visit the Jasenovac Memorial Centre but most visits were cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, Pejakovic said, noting that the interest shown indicated good potential.

Attitude to Holocaust, burdened by 30-year revisionism, improving

A representative of the Documenta NGO, Vesna Terselic, said that 2020 was a very important year because history textbooks were being prepared and because at the start of the year the Science and Education Ministry had for the first time set aside funds for school excursions to Jasenovac.

Terselic said that the attitude to the Holocaust was bad due to the legacy of revisionism that had been going on for the last 30 years, but that it was improving because room was being made for new programmes, owing to actions by the Education and Teacher Training Agency and positive acts by PM Plenkovic and President Zoran Milanovic regarding the Holocaust.

In that context, she underlined the importance of support to teachers in including education about the Holocaust in their curricula.

Historian Neven Budak warned that coming to terms with the past in school cannot make up for the frequent lack of critical dialogue in one’s own family and in that context he underlined the importance of the family in instilling the right values into children.