Trauma, Testimony and Lower Secondary Holocaust Education in Rywka Lipszyc's and Otto Wolf's Diaries

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Holocaust‐related trauma is represented in two diaries written by Jewish adolescents during the Second World War: Rywka Lipszyc's diary and Otto Wolf's diary. The article combines a thematically guided close reading of the diaries with a didactic discussion of their possible use in lower secondary literary education. The theoretical part situates Holocaust diaries as testimonial ego‐documents that record not only historical events but also disrupted everydayness, fear, loss, isolation, threatened identity and attempts to preserve agency through writing. The article argues that such texts should not be used primarily to provoke emotional identification, but to support historically informed understanding, critical reading and reasoned ethical judgement. The analysis identifies trauma‐related motifs in the selected diaries and interprets them in relation to testimony, memory and the ethical representation of the Shoah. The pedagogical section proposes a trauma‐informed and testimony‐sensitive framework for working with diary excerpts in lower secondary school: contextualisation before reading, careful selection of age‐appropriate excerpts, guided close reading, comparison of testimonial perspectives, reflection on historical and moral questions, and non‐intrusive forms of pupil response. The article contributes to Holocaust education and literary didactics by linking the close reading of children's Holocaust diaries with explicit safeguards against sensationalism, forced affectivity and performative empathy.