About This Project

A Decade of Teacher Work Attachments

Long before this project began, the Ministry of Education’s Teacher Work Attachment (TWA) scheme has been the throughline of my professional growth outside the classroom. Each attachment has stretched me in a different direction — from urban heritage to digital preservation to cultural curation — and each has reshaped how I bring history back to my students.

#1 MOE Heritage Centre — June 2014

My first TWA was two weeks at the MOE Heritage Centre, where I learned curatorial practices so that I could put together a proposal and storyboarding plan for Catholic Junior College — my school at the time — for a heritage gallery to commemorate its 40th anniversary in 2015.

#2 Urban Redevelopment Authority — December 2019

My second TWA paired me with the URA on a Telok Ayer & Ann Siang Hill heritage trail. The booklet I produced was later adapted into a virtual learning journey in 2021, and used as a template for the Bukit Timah and Dover trails in 2022.

#3 National Heritage Board — November 2022

My third TWA, with NHB, produced a digital 3D scan and virtual-reality experience of the Clock Tower at Hwa Chong Institution. The project was later published on Roots.sg and HCI Insights, and remains the attachment I am most often asked about by colleagues.

#4 The Intan — 2023/2024

My fourth TWA took me into the Peranakan home of Alvin Yapp. I authored a brochure on Peranakan history and material culture, then organised a staff learning journey with tea, kueh and an enriching conversation about how a private collection becomes public history.

The Most Ambitious One Yet

The “itch” to do more research had been with me since finishing my MA in May 2023, but it was not the right time. In 2024 I was teaching the A-level graduating cohort, and in 2025 I had just changed portfolio at a new school. In 2026, I felt it was now or never — and this self-sourced research study was the right project at the right time.

This attachment is, by some distance, the most ambitious one of my teaching career. The planning alone spanned ten months: mapping itineraries, corresponding with museums, seeking the necessary approvals, and deciding which sites align most with the project’s focus. The fieldwork itself was a forty-day visit across eight cities — Vienna, Bratislava, Győr, Budapest, Warsaw, Kraków, Paris and London — covering more than 40 museums and memorial sites in all, from major state museums to guided tours of Hitler’s Vienna and former concentration camp grounds.

At every site, I had two simple questions: What story is being told here? And who is being remembered? The other set of questions is just as important — whose story isn’t being told, and who has been left out, silenced, or forgotten.

Two Questions

Every memorial, museum, and monument I visited was built to answer two questions.

1. What story is being told?

Every site picks a version of events to put in front of you. Some places say: this was the Holocaust — millions of Jewish lives, ended. Others say: this was fascism, and we defeated it. Others say: this was a war, and we suffered too. All three can be partly true at the same time, but they are very different stories — and the one a country chooses to tell says a lot about how it sees itself.

2. Who is being remembered?

Once you know what story is being told, the next question almost answers itself: who is in it, and who isn’t? Some sites name individual Jewish victims — the Wall of Names in Paris, the Stolpersteine across Vienna, the “Nameless Library” at Judenplatz. Others remember the dead as a faceless group: “victims of fascism,” “war dead,” “the fallen.” And some people are barely there at all — Roma and Sinti victims, disabled victims, queer victims, women, children. The people who aren’t named, or who appear only at the edges of the room, are the ones who have been forgotten.

Remembering and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. Every time a memorial chooses to tell one story, it chooses to leave another one out.

Whose Stories, Site by Site

Travelling through eight cities across Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and France, ending in London, a map of European memory begins to take shape — not of what was remembered, but of whose stories each place chose to tell.

Holding more than a dozen sites in mind side-by-side makes one thing inescapable: every memorial is also a decision about who gets to be the subject of the story. Some institutions lead with named Jewish victims from the moment you enter; others tell the story through the people who liberated, occupied, or governed the dead; others fold Jewish suffering into a broader national narrative of martyrdom or resistance.

Vienna places individual Jewish lives at the centre of memory — the Judenplatz Memorial’s 65,000 unnamed books, the Stolpersteine that interrupt the pavement outside ordinary apartment doors. The story being told there is unmistakably Jewish lives, ended, not fascism, defeated. Mauthausen complicates this: as a perpetrator site on Austrian soil, it sits inside a long, difficult national reckoning with the “first victim” myth that Austria told about itself for decades after the war.

Budapest sits on a fault line. The Holocaust Memorial Center commits to Jewish specificity — naming victims, tracing the arc from discrimination to deportation — while the House of Terror, a short tram ride away, folds Hungarian Jewish suffering into a much wider story of twentieth-century terror that critics argue obscures the role of Hungarian collaborators. Bratislava offers a quieter version of the same tension: the Museum of Jewish Culture documents a community that once made up a fifth of the city; the site of the demolished Neolog Synagogue, replaced by a motorway bridge, asks who decided that erasure was acceptable.

Poland contains the widest range. Warsaw’s POLIN Museum insists that Polish Jewish life was a civilisation in its own right — a thousand years of history, not merely a prelude to destruction. The Warsaw Uprising Museum tells a different story of the same city, one where the Polish Home Army’s 1944 revolt against Germany is the central event, and the separate Jewish uprising of 1943 occupies a smaller room. In Kraków, the Galicia Jewish Museum argues, photograph by photograph, that Jewish Galicia existed as a living world before it was destroyed. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the question of whether the central subject is Jewish victims, Polish martyrs, or “the camp itself” has been quietly contested for eighty years.

Paris extends the map westward, into a different experience of the Holocaust. In Western Europe the Jewish populations were smaller and more assimilated, and the killing happened at a distance: Jews were arrested by their own country’s police, held in transit camps like Drancy, and deported east to be murdered out of sight. The Mémorial de la Shoah answers that distance with names: the 76,000 Jews deported from France. A smaller proportion was murdered than in the East, but here the complicity of the Vichy French State sits closer to home.

London frames the question twice over. The Imperial War Museum keeps two accounts of the same history under one roof: its Holocaust Galleries present the Shoah as a catastrophe in its own right — a story of Jewish lives and Jewish loss — while its Second World War Galleries fold that persecution into the chronology of the wider war. A short distance away, the Wiener Holocaust Library, founded in 1933 to document Nazism as it happened and now among the oldest archives of its kind, holds the raw material on which so much of this remembering rests. Together they make plain that each framing is a choice, not a given: the Holocaust can stand at the centre of its own story, or as one thread in a larger one — and London tells it both ways.

There is one further irony that only became clear through the research and conversations along the way. I set out to study Holocaust memory — but antisemitism and the exclusion of Jews did not begin in 1933 and did not end in 1945. Centuries of discrimination, expulsion, and legal exclusion preceded the Holocaust; prejudice and violence against Jewish communities have continued since. By framing this project around Holocaust museums and memorials, I have — like the institutions I was studying — made a choice about where the story starts and ends. Other chapters of Jewish history fall outside that frame. The question I kept asking of each site turns out to apply to this project too: whose stories are being told, and what is being left out?