Teaching about the Holocaust can be overwhelming.
How do you provide a meaningful learning experience for your students,
whether you have a month, a week, or even less?
What is an effective approach
to make learning about the Holocaust
relevant to students in todays world?
We, at Echoes and Reflections,
would like to share our approach with you.
With the end of WWII,
as the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed,
the world was shocked.
The dimensions of the catastrophe were unprecedented.
It was the first time
that an attempt was made to completely annihilate an entire nation.
Every single Jew was targeted.
It was not a battle over territory, assets or power.
This was a murder motivated by antisemitic, racist ideology.
Seventy years have passed.
Genocides and wars have happened since then.
Why is it still so important to teach about the Holocaust?
Echoes and Reflections is a program
that was created to prepare educators to teach about the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is a human story.
A story relevant to us all.
It was perpetrated by human beings against human beings,
in the center of civilization.
The Holocaust raises deep questions of morality,
ethics and human behavior that continue to echo today.
Here we can see Jewish men being deported to concentration camps after "Kristallnacht",
the Night of Broken Glass.
Here are the Jewish victims, here are the perpetrators.
Watching are the bystanders.
This photo, a primary source, raises many questions.
Why are these innocent people being deported?
Why aren't the bystanders doing something to help?
In order to answer, we must contextualize the photograph,
as we do with all other resources we use,
by relating it to the events of the period.
The story of the Jewish victims
is at the center of our study of the Holocaust.
How shall we teach this story?
We should not see it as the murder of six million anonymous Jews,
but rather that six million times an individual Jew was murdered.
Eli Bosak was born in Krakow, Poland,
to a Jewish family that had lived in the city for generations.
He was a smart child who enjoyed mathematics.
While in the ghetto, his father Avraham
was offered the chance to hide Eli and his sister, Renya.
He couldn't bear the thought of parting from them.
By the time he steeled himself to do so it was too late.
Eli and his sister were murdered in Auschwitz.
Eli was 11 years old. Renya was only 6.
We will never be able to understand
the torment of making this impossible decision.
We will never understand the enormity of his pain
when his children were taken away.
Giving the victims a face and a name by listening to testimonies of survivors
or reading words of those who perished evokes a sense of empathy with them.
They become real people.
The empathy created allows a more meaningful discussion
as students can relate more easily to human beings than to numbers.
As educators, the discussion should derive from the question:
How did Jews live in a world where they were treated as less than human
and ultimately sentenced to death?
Nazi Germany and its collaborators did not just murder the Jews,
they made every attempt to dehumanize them.
In the midst of this horrifying reality,
Jews struggled not only to survive,
but also to maintain their identity, values and dignity.
Let's look at this teacher in the Łódź ghetto.
Twenty-one percent of the ghetto's population
died from hunger, cold and disease.
Every person in the ghetto experienced the loss of a close relative or friend.
Nevertheless, schools were established.
Children learned.
Jews were confronted with dilemmas that challenged normal moral standards
and many times, were a matter of life and death.
What choices could they make in a world that was filled with choiceless choices?
Educators in the ghetto were anguished:
was it right to tell children not to steal food
when they were dying of starvation?
Mothers of infants with nothing to feed them agonized:
should they go to work to get food,
though it meant leaving their babies home alone?
Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate, described his arrival at Auschwitz
and how an inmate told him to lie about his age.
For Elie, lying was a betrayal of his identity and values.
However, though he didn't know it,
lying about his age turned out to be a question of life and death.
It is critical to make a distinction
between discussing a dilemma and creating a simulation.
Simulations can traumatize students
and may create the illusion that Jewish victims had a real choice
when in reality they had only choiceless choices.
This may lead students to believe
that the victims' bad choices determined their fates.
As the Holocaust unfolded,
death became ever-present.
We can't ignore this darkness when teaching about the Holocaust.
But focusing on the light in the darkness,
on the compassion that people showed toward one another,
on cultural and armed resistance,
gives the story meaning, and can inspire students.
For the survivors,
the struggle did not end with the end of the war.
This photo was taken in Bergen Belsen in 1945.
This wedding occurred that same year, in the same place.
It depicts the choice of life and continuity.
After the trauma and loss they had experienced,
survivors could have easily turned into embittered people, seeking revenge.
The educational emphasis should be on the fact
that most survivors chose a constructive path
rather than a destructive one.
In teaching the Holocaust,
we can't avoid dealing with the perpetrators.
Tolkatchev was among the liberating soldiers of the Russian army.
In his painting the victims' faces are illuminated.
The perpetrators are a faceless group.
Why does Tolkatchev depict them as faceless?
It's tempting to believe
that monsters perpetrated the Holocaust.
However, it's important to emphasize
that the perpetrators were human beings.
The Holocaust was not inevitable,
it was the result of choices.
As educators, we encourage our students to think critically.
How was it possible
that millions of people chose to become involved in mass murder?
Undoubtedly,
the perpetrators were influenced by a constellation of factors:
centuries of antisemitism, extreme ideology based on racism,
a totalitarian regime that turned racism into an official policy,
aggressive propaganda and education.
Perhaps we can interpret the painting as reflecting
that the perpetrators chose to ignore their humanity
by becoming part of the system of dehumanization and murder.
During the Holocaust, as their neighbors watched,
Jews were torn from the homes they had lived in for generations.
These people are participating in an auction of Jewish belongings.
Did they question whether something had happened to their Jewish neighbors?
Can we really see them as uninvolved bystanders?
These people also had a choice.
Elie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is not hate;
it is indifference.
This indifference was what enabled evil to spread.
But there were those who chose to act differently,
to risk their lives to try to save Jews.
These rescuers,
recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, came from all backgrounds.
They were young and old, rich and poor, peasants and intellectuals.
What made them risk their life and freedom for people who sometimes were strangers?
Dr. Pesante and his wife hid Hemda,
their daughter's Jewish friend, for over a year.
When Hemda suggested that she leave so as not to jeopardize them,
Dr. Pesante said to her,
"I beg you to stay with us for my sake, not yours.
"If you leave I will forever be ashamed to be part of the human race".
Miep Gies who helped hide Anne Frank and her family said:
"People sometimes call me a hero.
"I don't like it, because people should never think
"that you have to be a very special person to help those who need you!"
As educators, we understand that "Never Again" starts with education.
Focusing on choices, on values and on light in the darkness
may inspire our students to be critical thinkers, engaged learners,
and ultimately, compassionate citizens.
Our hope is that this will ultimately contribute to creating a better world.