Each and every society has a duty to pass on its legitimate cultural achievements to subsequent generations (Ricoeur 2006, 82). Unfortunately, it is equally the case that a society passes on its failures and those of their ancestors to the generations which follow. The history of World War II and the Shoah provides a plethora of moral dilemmas, hostile attitudes and violence, norms and values that challenged the basic conditions of humankind and the development of civilization. For Theodor Adorno, as he expressed in his essay “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (1970), the main goal of education was not to allow Auschwitz (a trauma for philosophy itself) to be repeated (see: Kranz 1998b, 140). He also argued for greater self-awareness and more self-criticism in relation to collective identities.

Frank Ankersmit (2004), asking what type of discourse is suitable to study the Holocaust, underlined that traumatic events from the past are traumatic because they cannot be accepted and assimilated. The painful memory of the Holocaust cannot be healed and should remain as a permanent scar which reminds us of this terrible crime. The above reflections on the nature of trauma perhaps provide the best insights into some of the processes present in post-1989 Poland, where the lack of public recognition of the Jewish past is present in so many places, along with the local silent memory of anti-Jewish violence and Jewish property, the houses where non-Jewish Poles are currently living and certain synagogues in ruins or transformed into cultural institutions or local businesses. Jewish property holds the memory of the greed of war, the unwanted and the (non)memory of local communities and its relations.

The experts on education about the Shoah, E. Doyle Stevick and Zehavit Gross (2015, 3, 5, 6), shared the conviction that TLH “effectively can contribute to making a better world, to protecting human rights and strengthening democracy and even to preventing genocide” yet they were aware that empirical research has not provided evidence that such correlations exist. Nonetheless, the connections between TLH and anti-racism, democratic, for human rights and citizenship education, multicultural, intercultural, peace, remembrance, global citizenship, against antisemitism, tolerance education both exist and are explored. The foundations are set by the surveys of knowledge about the Holocaust, but “attitudes and dispositions are particularly difficult to research” as they note.