Muslim prayer at Auschwitz. WikiCommons.

On Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, The Atlantic magazine published the back story to an unusual student trip to Auschwitz, in March, organized by al-Quds University Professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, who was attacked by the Arab media and Palestinian Authority figures for teaching the Jewish Holocaust to the 27 students that went to see the Nazi concentration camp with their own eyes.

The Atlantic published an Op-Ed written by Zeina Barakat, a doctoral candidate at Friedrich Schiller University, in Jena, Germany, who was mentored in the American Studies department by Daoudi, with whom she co-authored a Holocaust curriculum created for Palestinian students. Barakat was also the coordinator for the trip that brought 27 Palestinian students to bear witness to the Jewish Holocaust at the camp.

Barakat credited Daoudi with teaching her “a line from To Kill a Mockingbird that I remember him showing us in American culture class years ago. In the film, Atticus Finch turns to his daughter Scout and says: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.’ It is the same idea that the Japanese call oyakudachi, which means, ‘walking in the shoes of the other.'”

“Professor Dajani emphasized the importance of looking at the other person as if you are the other person. Only then can you truly understand how that person feels and why,” Barakat said. “Beyond this educational purpose, there was no political agenda to our trip.”

She said “Professor Dajani’s purpose in having his students learn about the Holocaust is to broaden their understanding of the psyche of ‘the other.'”

“Learning about the Holocaust—and its universal message about the threat of intolerance and genocide—has been a central theme of our work,” she said. “Together, we co-authored with Martin Rau a book in Arabic on the Holocaust to create awareness of this most tragic event among Palestinians.”

“We distributed the book both inside and outside the university, delivered lectures to civic groups, and showed films on the Holocaust in our workshops. More than once, we took our students to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Finally, the time came to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

“As a doctoral student, it is impossible for me to make believe that there was no human tragedy perpetrated against millions of Jews and non-Jews during the Second World War. The Holocaust is a fact, and we all have a sacred responsibility to ensure that it never happens again to Jews or any other group,” Barakat said.

“I believe our trip made a big crack in the Palestinian wall of ignorance and indifference about the Holocaust. The recent statement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recognizing the Holocaust as the ‘most heinous crime’ against humanity in modern history made another crack. Perhaps one day soon this wall will collapse.”

The program, entitled ‘From Stone to Flesh,’ was a joint effort of three institutions, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena; Tel Aviv University; and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, along with a Palestinian civil-society group founded by Dajani called  “al-Wasatia,” which means “moderation” in Arabic.

Barakat said the week-long trip to Poland was funded by the German Research Foundation. Al-Quds University, Dajani’s home institution, played no role in the program, she said.

“When we Palestinians returned from the unprecedented visit, a voyage that broke historic barriers of ignorance and misunderstanding, we were welcomed not with thanks and congratulations but with an explosion of criticism,” Barakat said. “Professor Dajani was the target of especially vicious attack by extreme Palestinian nationalists, who accused him of ‘selling out’ to the Jews.”

Barakat said that “some of Professor Dajani’s colleagues believe this entire exercise has been a curse, given the attacks and criticism we have suffered since we returned home. Yet Professor Dajani, the eternal optimist, sees only a blessing in what we have done. We have opened a crack in the wall of ignorance. We have made Palestinians talk publicly about a topic that was once taboo.”

She recounted her own education and how she sought out books about the Holocaust because it was not taught at school.

“I was born in Jerusalem in an Arab culture that, to put it mildly, ignores the Holocaust and avoids discussing it,” Barakat said. “As a young girl, I had to overcome social and educational restrictions to learn more about these closed chapters of history. Not only were books on the subject unavailable, but we were told that our responsibility as Palestinians was to memorize only what teachers told us, so as to reinforce our collective memory of loss and grievance and support our national identity and quest for a homeland.”

“Many Palestinians link what happened to the Jews during World War II with the Nakba, the Arabic word for ‘disaster’ and the term Palestinians use to describe the events of 1948, which led to their dispossession and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees. But those who argue that we Palestinians should close our eyes to the reality of the Holocaust because it was the cause of our national tragedy are wrong.”

“They know nothing about Zionist history, from the First Zionist Conference in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, to Britain’s Balfour Declaration calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1917, through the British mandate in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.”

“And those who argue, as student-critics of our trip wrote on Facebook, that the injustice Palestinians currently face is of the same magnitude as what happened to Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe are wrong, too,” Barakat said.

“However degrading and unfair our situation in Palestine is today—and yes, it is degrading and unfair—it pales in comparison to the dehumanizing horror, depravity, and evil conceived and implemented by Nazis and their collaborators.”