Abstract
In recent years, there has been increased recognition of the significance and relevance of Holocaust studies to nurses. However, these studies are rarely integrated in the nursing curriculum, and even when they are, the focus is usually on healthcare personnel who collaborated with the Nazi regime. This article aims to bridge this gap by analyzing a comprehensive requisite curriculum on the Holocaust for graduate nursing students. We emphasize the work of Jewish healthcare professionals during the Holocaust and the dilemmas they faced, as well as the trauma and resilience of Holocaust survivors, their treatment today, and implications for treating other patients.
This article examines how studying these issues affected the graduate students. It analyzes the reflective accounts written by the students, using qualitative content analysis and Grounded Theory. The findings suggest that students received tools to act professionally and empathetically while demonstrating greater sensitivity to the patients’ identity, past experiences, trauma, and how the hospital as a “total institution” affects them. Many of the students developed conscious leadership. The program used a personalized pedagogical approach that contributed to experiential learning but was also emotionally challenging for the participants. We recommend including Holocaust studies as a requisite component in nursing programs worldwide.
Teaching the Holocaust in nursing schools is uncommon. When these studies exist, they often focus on the collaboration of physicians and nurses with the Nazi regime. The current study presents a comprehensive requisite curriculum, which includes a review of the impressive healthcare system established by Jewish physicians and nurses in the ghettos and the terrible and often irresolvable ethical quandaries, conflicts, predicaments, and “choiceless choices” they faced as they attempted to deliver healthcare in subhuman conditions. The course described throughout this paper also provided graduate-level nursing students with professional, up-to-date, and evidence-based tools for optimal treatment of Holocaust survivors, post-trauma patients, and others.
The students reported that the course had provided them with tools to act professionally and empathetically while demonstrating greater patience and sensitivity to the patients’ identity and past experiences. The notion that learning about a patient’s background is crucial to their care can also be applied to other situations of atrocities, and even to everyday life. Furthermore, the students arrived at a more profound understanding of the meaning of a total institution for hospital patients. Importantly, studying the Holocaust encouraged the student nurses to become “witnessing professionals” who reveal, contest, and combat the “malignant normality,” i.e., the underlying dangerous assumptions and narratives that prevail in their society.