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<\/p>\nAs an adolescent boy, growing up in the 1960s, I used to enjoy playing with my newly minted Action Man. I would dress him up in various army uniforms and enact battles behind cushions. He was rugged and square-jawed, unlike me. My sister played with dolls. One day, I dressed my Action Man in a Wehrmacht Army uniform, an option that came with the figure. My Irish-Jewish mother, who never raised her voice, saw me playing with the German soldier and shouted. \u201cWhy is he wearing that uniform\u201d? Her reaction has stayed with me. This was one of the few times when the Holocaust was articulated in our Jewish household. Much later she recounted hearing the Luftwaffe bombing a Dublin Synagogue. It haunted her childhood. My father, born in the East End of London, was an evacuee as a budding teenager but ran home twice from rural Wales and a pig-centred household. Not that he ever spoke a word about his experience.<\/p>\n
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I was born fourteen years, almost to the day, after the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27th<\/sup>, 1944. This is the anniversary which is commemorated as Holocaust Memorial Day. I look back at my adolescence and feel the fear and anxiety that pervaded our household although I had no idea why this was the case. Such familial angst resulted in me not thinking about the Holocaust for many decades. It was not until 1987 that I began to teach Holocaust Testimony, for my own understanding, which I thought was rather late in the day. But it turned out to be the first curriculum of its kind in a British University. The extraordinary novelist, W. G. Sebald, asked me for my syllabus as he was about to introduce a similar course at the University of East Anglia. I, stupidly, had no idea what an honour that was.<\/p>\n Not that I regarded my module, which I teach to this day in the Department of English Literature at the University, as anything special. I just wanted to introduce to students (and myself) some of the most accomplished testimonies by those who were in the camps\u2014Jean Am\u00e9ry, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Ruth Kluger, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, Olga Yengyel. I assumed that the course would be short-lived. But it turned out that the 1990s were the boom years for Holocaust Studies with the opening of the Washington DC Holocaust museum in 1993 and the release of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> in 1994. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, access to crucial Soviet archives was granted for the first time, creating a parallel \u201cboom\u201d in historical accounts of mass killings, in ravines and trenches, in Eastern Europe. Not that the wider context is the reason why I continue to teach Holocaust Testimony. In over three decades, I have not had anything other than a remarkable response to the testimonies from my students. They keep me going.<\/p>\n