ABSTRACT
Madeleine Grumet tells us that curriculum is the presence of an absence. The absence of Auschwitz, the silence around this dreadful memory in my own educative experience, is like a gaping hole in the heart of memory. Silence around the Holocaust in my own education has not, however, silenced memory. In fact, silence has allowed this memory to speak to me in haunting ways. It has called me out of the site of my unconscious. The repressed has returned. As Emmanuel Levinas (1996) might say, the other, or the memory of my ancestors, has “summoned” (p. 6) me.
