Austrians discuss Holocaust at Md. Jewish day school

To the history teacher at one of the country's biggest Jewish schools, it was a chance to show her students that Europe didn't freeze in place at the end of World War II. To the Austrian officials, it was an opportunity to talk about how their country deals with its past with a curious group of American teenagers.

Students, teachers and officials came together Friday at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, and the discussion ranged from laws against Holocaust denial to how the subject is taught in Austrian schools.

"Society has to work on its past and have this discussion, even if it's not easy," said Andreas Schieder, state secretary in the Austrian Ministry of Finance. "Thinking about history . . . is an important guide to building up society as you want it now."

He visited the school with Austria's ambassador to the United States, Christian Prosl.

Students asked the officials what they were taught about the Holocaust as they grew up. The two Austrians -- members of separate postwar generations -- had starkly different responses.

"When I was in high school, our history education ended basically in 1918," said Prosl, 63. "You learned nothing in your school about the Holocaust. You learned about it in your families. And then it depended on which family you were in" -- some being more open about the past than others.

Schieder, 40, came of age in the 1980s, when a controversy erupted about the wartime service of Kurt Waldheim, Austria's president, who was banned from traveling to the United States on suspicion of involvement in Nazi war crimes. That controversy, and other watershed events in Germany around the same time, led to increased discussion in both countries about their involvement in the war.

Schieder said that he studied the Holocaust in his classes but that the most important conversations were among fellow schoolchildren, about what their parents and grandparents had done decades earlier.

Teachers at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day said they were glad to have any contact between their students and the Europeans.

"It's so important to me that our students meet Germans and Austrians. Sometimes the teenagers don't move past 1945," said Lauren Granite, one of the history teachers at the school. "Their association with everything German is Nazis."

Granite is trying to set up a trip next spring for some of her students to visit Berlin. "It's a chance to bring the present to our students," she said. She mentioned, as an example, a Berlin high school that went through Nazi-era yearbooks and documented what had happened to its Jewish students

Granite has worked with European Holocaust educators through a Vienna-based Jewish history group, Centropa, that arranged the Austrians' visit to the Rockville school.

One Charles E. Smith Jewish Day student said he enjoyed the discussion.

"It's definitely illuminating to learn about how countries involved in the Holocaust are dealing with it," said Josh Boxerman, 16.

That suited the ambassador.

"I want to talk about Holocaust education for anyone who wants to listen to us. . . . It's important that we keep the conversation alive," Prosl said.