Witness to History

Teaching the Holocaust to middle and high school students is a daunting task for any media specialist. But it doesn’t have to be. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, offers extensive resources on every aspect of the Holocaust, and educators and their students can benefit by visiting the museum or taking advantage of its online workshops and lesson plans. My students at Lakeview High School in Battle Creek, MI, were fortunate to experience both, thanks to the museum’s traveling exhibitions program and the efforts I made to bring two important exhibits to our city.

As librarians, we do a great job guiding our students to print and online resources, but most of us forget the treasures in our nation’s museums. Imagine the impact of a unit on the Holocaust if students could actually see photos of the clothes and toys that belonged to the millions who were killed, if they could read their letters and diaries, and hear survivors’ oral histories. It’s an experience they’d never forget. Most museums are underfunded and shortstaffed so they don’t have extensive outreach programs. But if you contact them directly, you are certain to get a welcoming response.

I became a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow in 2002. Part of my outreach project included securing a W. K. Kellogg Foundation grant to help bring the Holocaust Museum’s traveling exhibition on Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who rescued more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazis, to Battle Creek. More recently, our city hosted another Holocaust Museum exhibition from September 6 to November 13, 2005: Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust, which recounts the history of the thousands of children, particularly those under the age of 12, who went underground to escape Nazi persecution. Some children escaped death by hiding in attics, cellars, and sewers, while others were taken in by Gentiles and Catholic convents, where their true identities were concealed, and they lived in constant fear of being caught.

Life in Shadows is currently on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City until June 25, 2006. How can your students benefit from it if they can’t physically be there? For one, online lesson plans specifically created by Museum Teacher Fellows for use with the hidden children exhibition are an excellent guide. I’ve gathered these lessons, along with book reviews, and made them available through the Museum Fellowship Teaching Resources Web site.

Four lessons specifically deal with the topic of hidden children. “Children in Hiding During the Holocaust” by William Younglove, a retired teacher from Long Beach, CA, shows middle school language arts students the varied places where children were hidden—from the open forest to a claustrophobic closet to a crawl space beneath removable floorboards. By assigning extensive research papers and oral presentations, the unit—which adheres to California’s language arts and social studies content standards—helps students understand how these children grappled with practical issues, such as what items to take with them, and how hiding shaped their future lives.

“In Hiding: A Choiceless Choice of the Holocaust” by Aimee Young, a teacher at Loudonville High School in Ohio, exposes students to the various aspects of life in hiding, from daily activities to coping mechanisms. Students, for example, are asked to analyze a first-person account of hiding and to write their own personal response, as well as to explain the significance of writing as a way to record and express the feelings and experiences of hidden children.

“Let Me Sing a Carefree Song Once More: Poetry of Hidden Children” by Laura Pritchard Dobrin, a teacher at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy in Virginia, asks students to examine four poems dealing with hidden children to gain different perspectives into their experiences. “Hidden Children and the Holocaust: A Lesson and Pledge for Action” by Scott Durham, my colleague at Lakeview High School, asks students to compare their lives to those of hidden children by exploring the online version of Life in Shadows.

The Holocaust Museum also provides downloadable teaching materials and resources. They include the museum publication Teaching about the Holocaust, which contains a historical summary, a chronology, and an annotated bibliography and videography about Holocaust-related topics; a set of 37 USHMM Identification Cards—which describe the experiences of people who hid or were rescued, as well as those who survived internment in ghettos and camps; “Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933–1945,” five brochures about non-Jewish Holocaust victims, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, and those with handicaps; and photographs of artifacts from the museum’s permanent exhibition, such as 300,000 pairs of confiscated shoes and railway cars that transported Jews to death camps.

A Holocaust Educators’ Workshop given by Stephen Feinberg, head of National Outreach in the Museum’s Education Department, proved invaluable to the 50 Michigan secondary school teachers who brought their students to Battle Creek to see Life in Shadows. The workshop, “Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust,” discusses the rationale and considerations that should be addressed by educators before beginning a Holocaust unit.

If you and your students are planning to visit Life in Shadows, it’s a good idea to prepare them beforehand. At Lakeview High School this past fall, English classes incorporated the reading of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s wrenching novel Night into the curriculum, replacing the reading of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Night, which recounts Wiesel’s own experiences in death camps in Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald with such detail that it’s considered an autobiography, is about a teen consumed with guilt at having survived the genocide that killed his family.

As the media specialist in charge of coordinating technology related to Lakeview’s Holocaust unit, I created a blog so students could exchange their views of Night with kids 720 miles away in the English class of Honey Kern at Cold Spring Harbor High School in New York. Lakeview High School English teacher Carol Terburg found the blog to be an effective and engaging teaching tool, giving students the chance to talk to their peers in another part of the country. As a result, kids ended up exploring questions that were essential to their Holocaust lesson without realizing it. For example, one student asked, “How does one dehumanize another person/group?” Terburg says that her students found the blog to be the most meaningful activity related to Wiesel’s book.

In addition to our coordinated lessons, Pierre Sauvage, a Holocaust child survivor and filmmaker, visited our school to talk to students and show a portion of his Emmy Award–winning documentary Weapons of the Spirit, about the people of the mountain community of Le Chambon, France, who defied the Nazis and took in 5,000 Jews, including Sauvage and his parents. Lakeview students also attended a presentation by Miriam Brysk, an artist and Holocaust survivor, a book talk by author Miriam Winter, who was once a hidden child, and a panel discussion led by Rene Lichtman, cochair of the Hidden Children and Child Survivors of Michigan.

From an educational perspective, is it better for students to view Life in Shadows in person or online? At the moment, I’m trying to find the answer to that question. Through my participation in an interdisciplinary information science doctorate program at the University of North Texas in Denton, I’ve composed an online survey to obtain student responses to both versions of the exhibition. Michigan students responded to the survey last fall, and the survey is being made available to teachers nationwide who would like to assess what their students learned from the Life in Shadows exhibition.

The study’s findings, expected to be complete by March, may also help teachers and museum curators find ways to integrate technology into the classroom more effectively. The findings may also provide museum personnel with new insights on how to improve their exhibits. This research project will be presented as a formal paper at the Museums and the Web 2006 Conference in Albuquerque, NM, March 22–25, 2006.

When Life in Shadows officially opened at the Battle Creek Art Center on September 6, 2005, students from more than 32 schools statewide signed up to attend. They saw an actual wardrobe from an apartment in Poland’s Zawiercie ghetto that five-year-old Frederik Steinkeller was forced to hide in and a green sweater worn by eight-year-old Krystyna Chiger who hid with her family and 16 others for more than a year in the sewers beneath the Lvov ghetto. The students also watched the film I’m Still Here: Real Diaries of Young People Who Lived During the Holocaust, featuring archival footage, personal photos, and excerpts from the diaries of young people who experienced the terror of daily life during the Holocaust. The film first aired in May 2005 as part of MTV’s “think antidiscrimination” campaign.

When we heard the reactions of our students, we knew all our months of hard work had paid off. “I will always remember the words of the children who went through the Holocaust,” said one eighth grade student. “And I will never forget the look on their faces, confusion and disbelief.” Another middle school student said, “We are truly lucky to be free and in America. And to think it’s only been 60 years since this crazy madness happened.” And a high school senior said, “I felt very strongly about our visit to the art center. I knew a fair amount about the Holocaust but was able to still learn more. The actual artifacts made it more interesting and made the knowledge connect to us. To think that 1.6 million children died. This exhibit truly impacted my life.”