First online conference - Introduction to Holocaust history by Hubert Strouk - May 6 2025
The first online session of the Neshama project was dedicated to an introduction to the history of the Holocaust. Led by Hubert Strouk, Head of the Education Department at the Mémorial de la Shoah, this session provided young ambassadors with the historical and geographical framework needed to understand what the term Holocaust means and what the genocidal process involved.
Teaching the history of the Holocaust is no simple task. The events, actors, and national contexts involved are numerous, and the implementation of anti-Jewish persecution and genocide varied across Europe depending on each country’s relationship to Nazi Germany. In this introductory session, Hubert Strouk helped participants grasp this complexity while also highlighting the importance of terminology, historical scale, and the progression from antisemitic prejudice to mass extermination.
By tracing the development of hatred against Jews in Europe, the gradual exclusion of Jewish populations, and the stages leading to the “Final Solution to the jewish question,” the session offered students a clear entry point into one of the most complex chapters of twentieth-century history. It laid the groundwork for a deeper understanding of the Holocaust as both a historical event and a European process of radicalization, persecution, and destruction.