Tabari Coleman - As I think back to when I first learned about the Holocaust, my memories are mainly of sympathy for all those who died. At the time, I think my teachers thought it was more important for me to be shocked by the deaths, the pictures of piles of bodies, and the enormity of six million Jews perishing during this terrible time. Not once did we consider the individual lives that were lost, or individual stories about people’s parents, children, grandparents, neighbors, or friends.

Since engaging with Echoes and Reflections, I’ve wondered how that history could have been made more relevant in my own life and the lives of our students. As I prepared to come to Jerusalem, friends and colleagues asked why I would come so far to learn about the Holocaust since I’m not Jewish.  I was reminded of how valuable it has been in my professional development to meet and hear from Holocaust survivors and how their stories have changed my perspective on this history.

The survivors’ stories are what took me from sympathy to empathy. As we relate to their stories, we see ourselves. I saw my grandparents, my family, someone I loved being mistreated for something as small as their religious identity. Each of us, whether it is because of our race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, or religion, can relate to being the “other.” We make the Holocaust relevant for students by highlighting individual stories, bringing an individual face to six million, and allowing our students to understand them not only as victims, but as human beings.

At Yad Vashem, we also examined strategies to help teachers talk about life before the Holocaust, highlighting the activities that students can relate to: going to school, laughing, playing music, and writing. Until, one day it all changed. One day their world stopped and was forever changed. By taking the time to help students understand even one or two individual stories, they have a chance to see themselves. I see that learning as even more valuable than fully understanding all the historical facts and figures. The numbers only tell us part of their stories; the photos, diary entries, poems, and other primary source materials complete the story.

Being in Jerusalem has been powerful on another level, because this sanctuary didn’t exist for the Jewish people in 1933 when most of the world turned a blind eye to their pleas for help.  Seeing a community thriving after more than half of its population was killed gives me hope.

Hate, bias, and discrimination are the building blocks to genocide. Educators have a responsibility to ensure the next generation never forgets what happens when oppression goes unchecked.

Esther Hurh – In high school, the Holocaust was another set of paragraphs to read in my textbook.  It might as well have been a list of factoids written on the side of a cereal box. I came away with a basic framework about World War II, Hitler, and Nazi Germany. I knew about the murder of six million Jews, and remembered Anne Frank. Now, several decades later, I recognize that the Holocaust, and Holocaust education, is so much more than facts and figures.  

The Holocaust is, more than anything, a human story.

When looking at what happened as the Nazi anti-Jewish policy evolved into the establishment of the ghettos and, later, concentration and extermination camps, I ask myself not only about death but also about life.  How did Jews live and cope in the face of increasing dehumanization?  How was it possible that families could stay physically, emotionally, and mentally intact in the various ghettos, designed explicitly to confine, control, and weaken the prisoners?  

As I studied at Yad Vashem to enhance my work with teachers, we thought about how to help students better understand the Holocaust. What moves us, and what will be memorable for them, are the stories of people.  It begins before the Holocaust.  Learning about people’s lives prior to the war helps us appreciate the transformation and what they lost.

At Yad Vashem, we considered the importance of recognizing emotions that give meaning to these events and therefore to these people.  Visual history testimonies communicate how survivors felt about the situation in the words, the tone, and the pace of their voice, and their body language.  Margaret Lambert’s testimony helps paint a picture of life before and after 1933.

Diaries can trace the changes in people’s psyche.  Dawid Sierakowiak who lived in Lodz and died in the Lodz ghetto wrote at the start of the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939: “Long live humor; down with hysteria!”  Fast forward to April 15, 1943 in the ghetto: “I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy.  There is really no way out of this for us.”  

We also studied inanimate objects and considered how they tell a story of how people reacted in the face of dehumanization and despair.  A series of posters found on the walls of the Vilna ghetto advertised theater productions, symphonies, and basketball games, which were attended by many.  Incredulous as it may be― to care about anything above the physiological needs― these events brought some respite in their hellish reality.  Jews made an effort to find light in the darkness, to stave off despair as much as they could.

Individualizing and therefore humanizing the story is what has connected me to this history.  As we spent this week looking more deeply into material that will enhance our Echoes and Reflections professional development programs, I couldn’t help but keep asking questions about how people lived in this upside-down world and, in the same breath, how others could participate or else let it happen.  

Students, like me, are curious about more than the numbers and facts. Helping them see the individual stories and consider the moral decisions and dilemmas Jews faced, opens up new perspectives. The Holocaust begins to resonate differently when we see people with full lives impacted in terrible ways, and understand the struggle and the choices people faced in order to survive.  Like the individual threads of a tapestry—with their various colors, textures, lengths and thicknesses― these individual and unique stories intertwine to create a larger, richer, more complicated, messy, and confusing narrative that have no pat answers but rather inspire more vexing questions. The stuff of drama. The Human Story.

Tabari Coleman is the Project Director for the A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute for the Missouri and Southern Illinois regional office of the Anti Defamation League. Esther Hurh is an education program consultant and trainer with 20 years of expertise in civil rights, diversity and inclusion, bullying prevention, and Holocaust Education. She currently resides in Chicago, IL.

The current generation of youth must navigate a complex social, economic, and political climate and they often struggle to make sense of the world around them.  Technology adds to the complexity.  We are in the midst of a technological revolution and the rapid development of digital platforms as extensions of ourselves in the 21st century.

So, the question is, how do we teach the Holocaust to today’s youth? This is an increasingly important question.  How we, as adults, educators, mentors, and authority figures, help the youth of today see the nuances of the world, while still being grounded in the history of the past, and the mark of the Holocaust in defining the 20th century. Answering that question is about identifying the personal and the political. It is about showing students a way to see the events of the Holocaust as relevant to their own lives, to a larger historical legacy that we all share and must grapple with. History never lives in a vacuum.

In our partnership with Echoes and Reflections, one of the ways that we seek to help answer these complex questions is through the integration of testimony with the teaching of the history. At USC Shoah Foundation – Institute for Visual History and Education, we see testimony as the key to critically engaging with these complex stories that allow for students to see the relevance of the past to their present. The Institute’s theory of change asserts that when students and teachers work with testimony, they will experience attitude and behavior changes that will make them more likely to contribute to civil society. Our online IWitness program provides students with the tools to explore testimony through a variety of activities that target student’s abilities to think critically, gain multi-media skills, and to deconstruct stereotypes.

A good example of the power of testimony can be seen in the IWitness activity entitled “Kristallnacht.” The activity, which was developed for use with Echoes and Reflections, illustrates a powerful example of anti-Semitism and the systemic cultural violence that marred Europe before World War II. In 1938, Germany unleashed a number of violent acts against the Jewish population across Germany and Austria known as “Kristallnacht” or the “Night of Broken Glass.” This IWitness Information Quest allows students to explore a variety of primary source material, including film footage, photographs, and survivor testimony to make sense of how this event fits within a larger Holocaust history.  

As students complete tasks associated with this activity, they are asked to create a word-cloud by the end to demonstrate a personal understanding of the historical information, including a better understanding of anti-Semitism across Europe.  Engaging with testimony from someone like H. Henry Sinason, who as an adolescent experienced violence and hatred first hand, allows students to develop empathy for others who are experiencing violence.

By learning about the specificity of the Holocaust through personalized testimony, students can begin to decipher the noise of larger social, political, and cultural events that not only paint the past, but also contribute to current positive social change relevant to their own community and peers. Through participation, we can help students make sense of this current and past landscape. And, we can provide the necessary tools for students to be engaged and to be active participants in countering hate in today’s world.

Dr. Stephen D. Smith is the Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation ‐ The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Dr. Paul B. Winkler has been an instrumental force in guiding New Jersey’s Holocaust education policy since the 1970s. With over 50 years experience as a teacher and administrator, and as the current Executive Director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, his leadership has informed the implementation of Holocaust education statewide.

Winkler shares, “I am proud that New Jersey led the way with a well-thought-out approach that will not only lead to a thorough understanding of the history of the Holocaust, but to steps that will ensure that tragedies like the Holocaust will never happen again.”

Since 2005, Winkler has worked closely with Echoes and Reflections to offer professional development opportunities to educators implementing this mandate. “Echoes and Reflections is an outstanding professional development program and that is why we have gone out of our way to recommend that schools and programs in New Jersey utilize it,” Winkler shares. “Our teachers use it because it is an incredibly good resource and provides educators excellent guidance and value.”

The Role of Educators

As a strong proponent of the impact education can have on students, Winkler shares that, in the case of the Holocaust, it is important that teachers consider more than the history, the knowledge, and the facts. “In Western society, we have always believed that education, particularly universal education, is the answer to most of the world’s problems. But, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were highly educated people with expansive knowledge. Engineers designed the crematoria; doctors prepared and implemented the experiments. How was this possible?” And, what does that mean about the role of education and the role of teachers?

Winkler suggests that Holocaust education requires educators to consider deeply the way they teach and how they choose to present information. The Holocaust is unlike other subjects in that it requires teachers to take a particularly active role in developing students’ critical thinking skills that will enable them to identify and analyze human nature and behavior.

Understanding that genocide is “a consequence of prejudice and discrimination” is central, according to Winkler. “The issues of moral dilemma and conscience have a profound impact on life.” Examining these subjects highlights the personal responsibility that each citizen bears to fight antisemitism, racism, and all forms of bigotry and hatred wherever and whenever it happens.

Taking Responsibility

According to Winkler, the Holocaust raises many questions that inform students’ behavior in the world: “What is our individual responsibility? If we see something evil, should we report it? What if reporting it would endanger your job or personal safety? What is our responsibility as a nation? Are we collectively tasked with speaking out against persecution and injustice in our communities? What about injustice in other parts of the world?”

Winkler highlights the power in asking these questions and considers the impact of this line of questioning the most important lesson for students when studying the Holocaust. As students confront these and many other difficult questions it becomes clear how individual choices have an impact on other people and one’s broader context.

The New Jersey mandate to teach Holocaust and genocide education is a strong statement about the value of teaching respect and building strong communities. It encourages a “depth of conscience” in students that ultimately highlights one’s personal responsibility to combat prejudice of any sort. With the Commission emphasizing the importance that students grasp the consequences of ignoring those who hate, Winkler feels that Holocaust education will play a central role in encouraging awareness in students.

“The Holocaust remains one of the most disturbing and horrific events of all time…” Winkler adds. “If we are to ensure that it is never repeated, we must understand how the Holocaust happened in the first place, and spend time thinking through what these lessons can teach us about our lives today.”

The late Dr. Paul B. Winkler served as the Executive Director of The Commission on Holocaust Education in New Jersey. Winkler was formally involved in Holocaust, genocide, and prejudice reduction education since 1974.

Randi Boyette, Associate Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia Regional Office, and Cynthia Murphy, Director of Curriculum, Technology, and Resources at Seneca Highlands Intermediate Unit 9 (IU9), talk about Pennsylvania’s efforts to prioritize Holocaust education through Act 70.

Enacting Act 70

As a convener of the Regional Consortium of Holocaust Educators in Greater Philadelphia, and consultant on the Act 70 Implementation Committee, Boyette shares, “The Department of Education has made a strong commitment to increase Holocaust, genocide, and human rights violations education in Pennsylvania… Act 70 is the document that says, ‘We think it is important to teach about the Holocaust, this is why, and we at the Department of Education are going to help you do it.’”

Pennsylvania consulted experts from across the country in the development of Act 70. Dr. Kori Street, Director of Education at USC Shoah Foundation, joined Boyette, along with representatives from the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and more.

Murphy works with educators in fourteen districts in Pennsylvania and is responsible for facilitating and providing professional development for teachers and administrators. In implementing Act 70 she shares that, “As educators, we have the responsibility to teach the Holocaust in a thoughtful, purposeful, and safe way for our kids. We have that opportunity, that obligation.”

Why Teach the Holocaust?

“Holocaust education is so linked to character education, civic engagement, and the kind of people students are – or can be,” Boyette shares. “That is the power of Holocaust education. It engages students intellectually while also appealing to their hearts.”  Murphy echoes that this is best achieved when strong pedagogy is coupled with compelling material. “When our teachers have a good understanding, our students get a good understanding. It is our responsibility to make sure that they know what happened in the past, and that teachers use this material in a way that fosters empathy.”

Holocaust education presents the unique opportunity to contemplate hard questions about human nature, and challenges students to consider their own choices while learning about an important period in history.

Key Components of Comprehensive Holocaust Education

Act 70 outlines curriculum guidelines to teach the Holocaust effectively to students. “Echoes and Reflections, along with IWitness, are excellent examples of resources that meet the Act 70 guidelines in terms of its pedagogy. The Pennsylvania Department of Education sees Echoes and Reflections as a wonderful partner in offering teacher training programs,” Boyette shares.

Act 70 encourages the inclusion of the following subjects where appropriate in instruction:

1. Discuss the breadth of the history of the Holocaust, including the Third Reich dictatorship, concentration camp system, persecution of Jews and non-Jews, Jewish and non-Jewish resistance, and Post World War II trials.
2. Include the definition, history, response, and actions taken in the face of genocide, including the Holocaust and any other genocide perpetrated against humanity.
3. Discussion of human rights violations, antisemitism, racism, and the abridgment of civil rights.

“I think Echoes and Reflections is going to make it easier for Pennsylvania teachers to be compliant with Act 70,” says Boyette. “It is crafted to keep the focus on the lives of the victims and not the perpetrators, and it contextualizes the history while complying with Common Core.” Resources in Lesson Components on the Echoes and Reflections website relate directly to the guidelines in Act 70.

Examining the Holocaust challenges students to consider difficult questions. “How did people stand by and watch?” Murphy asks. “Echoes and Reflections is so rich with primary sources that it makes you think and wonder about why people made the choices they made. Listening to survivor testimony and hearing their stories is really impactful to students as well as teachers. You can’t put yourself in their place but it’s a question that will challenge kids to really think. What is the level of responsibility for people who knew and how do you determine the difference between guilt and blame?”

Professional Development in Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has added Holocaust education resources to their website and will be offering professional development opportunities for educators statewide.

Echoes and Reflections is hosting 18 professional development programs in Pennsylvania in October and November 2015. Teachers will learn about the requirements of Act 70 along with effective teaching strategies to help students understand what happened during the Holocaust, why it happened, and how it relates to different issues they face today.

Cynthia Murphy is the Director of Curriculum, Technology, and Resources at Seneca Highlands Intermediate Unit 9 (IU9), in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. Randi Boyette is the Associate Regional Director for the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia Regional Office.

With years of classroom teaching, educator training, and curriculum development experience, Batiste and Lourie highlight elements of the Echoes and Reflections Teacher’s Resource Guide that support students’ contextual and historical understanding of Night.

Providing Context with Echoes and Reflections Resources

“I recommend getting a sense of what students already know prior to reading Night, and use Echoes and Reflections resources to help fill in the gaps,” Batiste says. “Whenever possible the teacher can then add necessary context.”

Night, which begins in 1941, portrays a town where life was continuing much as it always had, relatively undisturbed by the Holocaust or the war, which had begun two years prior with the German invasion of Poland. “In March of 1944, when Hungary was invaded and Wiesel’s experiences began, the war was actually almost over and approximately 5 million Jews had already been murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators,” Batiste says. “Yet, when the Jews of Sighet are round up it is a shock.” Batiste recommends using the Echoes and Reflections timeline to help students understand the chronology of events. She adds that such an understanding gives deeper meaning to Wiesel’s words, “The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally our illusions.”

Lourie agrees with the importance of providing context. “Early in the book Wiesel talks about Jews being targeted, being sent to the ghettos, being sent away… We have to raise the question of ‘Why? What was it like in the world at the time?” Both Batiste and Lurie highlight Echoes and Reflections Lesson 2: Antisemitism, which is designed to help teachers translate abstract ideas (e.g., antisemitism, propaganda, stereotypes, scapegoating) into active learning experiences. This context offers students the tools to create a framework for processing and organizing difficult information. In particular, the Summary of Antisemitism helps introduce a basic understanding of the context and ideology behind the Holocaust. “The memoir offers Wiesel’s account. It is also important to have a broad sense of what happened,” Lourie says.

Later in the text, Wiesel describes his experience in the spring of 1944 when his parents’ home was absorbed into the ghetto in Sighet and extended family members came to live with them. Building on the exploration of antisemitism and Nazi racial policies, Lesson 4: The Ghettos, offers educators resources to discuss the larger context of the “Ghettos in Europe” and offers a comparison with the larger ghettos in Lodz and Warsaw that were in existence for longer.

In addition, Batiste recommends utilizing Reflect and Respond to encourage student to consider the way ghettos marked the end of freedom for Jews. Integrating testimony offers additional insight. She highlights Joseph Morton who describes the experience of living in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, and shares that in the several years he spent in Lodz, he lived in a constant state of fear.

The “Final Solution” and Auschwitz

“Night raises profound questions for students,” Batiste notes. “I dig deeply into Lesson 5: The “Final Solution” with educators and together we think through how it connects with Night. Teachers always have wonderful ideas about how these resources can enhance their teaching and encourage students to think in complex ways about the ideas presented.”

Lesson 5: The “Final Solution” offers historical information and personal stories from survivors of the Nazi extermination camps. An excerpt from Night and the accompanying resources in the Teacher’s Resource Guide, ask students to consider why families were forcibly separated. Testimony from survivors offer additional insight and include Ellis Lewin, who describes his arrival at Auschwitz, and Abraham Bomba, who describes his first moments in Treblinka.

“I always show the Auschwitz Album,” Batiste notes. The photographs provide a visual reference for the selection process that Wiesel describes in Night. In his book, Wiesel says, “I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes,” to which his father responds, “The world? The world is not interested in us…”

Lourie recommends doing a deep read of this passage and supporting students in considering how the world responded and the idea of responsibility as discussed in Lesson 9: Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders. “What made it possible for people to live?” she asks, “In 1944 what did the world know? What did the world do? I have found that art, like Thou Shall Not Kill, is helpful in deepening students learning and promotes critical thinking. Consider moral questions: What is the foundation of morals? What the artist is saying in this piece is everything is crushed. If the Holocaust crushed it, what is left?”

“The book ends when Elie sees himself in the mirror. What happens after? How does one reconstruct life?” Lourie asks. She recommends referencing Lesson 8: Survivors and Liberators and discussing returning to life and what it means to be a survivor with students. Batiste emphasizes Anton Mason’s testimony as a powerful conclusion for a lesson on Night. Also a survivor from Sighet, Mason describes the day he was liberated and that the first person he talked to was Elie Wiesel. In his testimony he says, “We are free but how will we live our lives without our families?”

Preparing to Teach Night?

Register for an Echoes and Reflections professional development program that focuses on materials and instructional strategies that prepare teachers to effectively teach Elie Wiesel’s Night. Our Night programs also provide additional background on the memoir that teachers can integrate into their instruction.

Deborah Batiste is the Echoes and Reflections Project Director at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). She resides in Ocean Pines, MD and has facilitated professional development programs for Echoes and Reflections across the United States since 2005. Shani Lourie has been at Yad Vashem since 2002 and is currently the Director of the Pedagogical Division of the International School for Holocaust Studies.

Many know that I survived World War II and the Holocaust thanks to my nanny, but some don’t realize that after being reunited with my parents at the age of 5, I had to learn how to be Jewish. One thing I remember is making the sign of the cross in the home of my parents, who were observant Jews. Even once I was reunited with my parents, I did not know who or what I was. As a child, with my nanny, I had been a good practicing Catholic. I grappled with this terrible burden for years and those feelings and memories left a lasting impression. The Holocaust changed the trajectory of my life—and millions of others—simply because we were Jewish.

The transformation that followed, and the rediscovery and reengagement with my Jewish faith and culture, was not easy; but the experiences of my childhood coupled with the lessons my parents taught me inspired my lifelong commitment to fighting anti-Semitism and ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten.

The devastation of the Holocaust has ripple effects beyond what is often taught in textbooks or as a passing reference in a history class.  Every single survivor has a story—stories often replete with horror, desperation, and a one in a million chance of survival. I realized early on that it is very important to provide a human voice to the Holocaust so that others understand that each life lost or saved was a person with feelings, experiences, family, and a future.  It’s easy for people to repeat “six million” and “never forget” without actually understanding what that means for both the Jewish people and the human race.

So it may come as no surprise that as I retire, I do so with the greatest pride in the role the ADL has had in building Echoes and Reflections, our Holocaust education program developed in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem, and the ongoing leadership and support of Dana and Yossie Hollander.  This innovative program lends that human voice to the experiences of the Holocaust and prepares teachers to help students understand the ongoing relevance of this history to our contemporary society.  

This work has never been so critical. Can you imagine my disgust as I read articles about Eric Hunt (a Holocaust denier known for attacking Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel) who is creating a virtual "Holocaust Hoax Museum” that will dispute the Holocaust happened?  It seems inconceivable that in 2015 Holocaust imagery and phrases like, “Hitler Should Have Finished the Job” are being used on college campuses and to desecrate synagogues nationwide.  

How is it possible that seventy years after the Shoah, we are questioning whether or not Jews can live peacefully in pluralistic countries like France, Belgium, Sweden, or Denmark?  And just last month in Spain, three visibly identifiable Muslim women reportedly chanted, “Catch and kill all the Jews…. Exterminate them, exterminate them, the world will be better off,” while one of the women stabbed a doll of an Orthodox Jew with a knife.  

How horrific.

This rise of anti-Semitism here and abroad disturbs me deeply and is heartbreaking for the thousands of Holocaust survivors who remain, who fear that humankind has really not learned from the horrors of its past.  For me, I want my grandchildren to understand that evil exists in this world, and that Jews and other groups of people are being persecuted even today, but just as importantly, I want them to know that there are far more people out there who will stand for others, who challenge misinformation, stereotypes, and who do not and will not sit idly by in the face of hate.  

I have often said that until we develop an antidote to hate, education is our best response. I firmly believe this to be true.  This is why I have such a deep respect and gratitude for the more than 25,000 educators who have worked with Echoes and Reflections these past ten years.

For those of you reading this who are a part of our Echoes and Reflections educator community, I know that teaching about Holocaust history can be daunting and challenging, with limited time, competing priorities, and the need to respond to the many diverse needs of the young people in your classrooms.   I fear sometimes that we are giving you too heavy a burden; the history is too horrible, too complex, too removed for many students in 2015.  

Yet, you do not shy away from the challenge.  Every day, we see more and more of you come to our programs, you help your students understand the seemingly incomprehensible level of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, you ask them the tough questions and help them make meaningful connections, and you find enough grace and hope in this dark past to give belief in a brighter future.  It is your actions that give me hope in a brighter future.

For this, as a Holocaust survivor, as a Jew, as a father and grandfather, I say thank you.

Abraham H. Foxman, is the former National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Currently, he is the head of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

The St. Louis has come to symbolize American inaction and the threatening consequences of being a bystander. Asylum seekers petitioned for the right to disembark in Cuba and then were denied entry to the United States and Canada. After sailing close to the shores of Miami Beach, the St. Louis was officially turned back and passengers were forced to return to Europe, much of which was already under Nazi domination.

The story of the voyage is well documented and it had long been assumed that the majority of St. Louis passengers perished at the hands of the Nazis. Miller and Ogilvie wanted to know more and in posing the question embarked on what became a decade of research and detective work.

Miller has joined Echoes and Reflections at the Charlotte and Jacques Wolf Conference for the past eight years. This unique weeklong professional development opportunity, made possible by the generosity of Charlotte and Jacque Wolf and Dana and Yossie Hollander, brings an exclusive group of secondary educators from across the country together for an in-depth program to learn effective teaching strategies from Holocaust and genocide experts, authors of Holocaust literature, survivors, and other witnesses. Miller offers a captivating presentation in which shares the journey he and Ogilvie took in tracing the stories of the 937 St. Louis passengers inviting educators to join him in unraveling the hidden truth behind what happened to everyone that was aboard the St. Louis.

“I love it! I absolutely love the opportunity to speak with teachers,” Miller said when asked about his upcoming presentation at the Wolf Conference. “Many of the teachers are at the beginning stages of their career and everyone is so full of energy and eager to learn. Its great! We have very diverse participants and everyone is learning to teach the Holocaust.”

In focusing on the passengers and the human experience, Miller’s telling of the St. Louis story emphasizes the reality and the consequences. “It shows that there are real consequences on individual people and their lives when ships are sent back. Focusing on the individual stories brings a valuable perspective. History is about individuals and that is something that is very much a cornerstone of the work that Echoes and Reflections does and why my work fits so well with what educators are learning at the Wolf Conference. History is more than kings and government. In terms of talking with students, I would hope it’s valuable because it’s the detective work that makes history fun and more hands on. This research was about making home visits, going through cemeteries, looking at old telephone books…”

Miller’s presentation about the St. Louis at the Wolf Conference helps teachers think about these moments in history critically. “We all want to make what we teach relevant. Being that we’re in the middle of a lot of refugee crises right now across the globe and with the story of the St. Louis being so obviously about refugees,  it’s a fantastic opportunity.”

Miller emphasizes, however, that his presentation is, “Not a history lecture. I tell the story of how we found out what became of them with a PowerPoint that includes photos of all the people involved... Telling the story of what happened makes the story whole again.”

Using a short video of a St. Louis passenger who survived, Miller models teaching through exploration and takes his audience on a journey. The video is of an older woman who was on the voyage with her brother, newly wed husband, and parents but at the end of the war, she was the only survivor. She talks to the camera about living through forced labor in a munitions factory where she said she sabotaged the war effort by making faulty products. “We filmed her in the US. She passed away at age 90.”

Educators attending the Wolf Conference always have a lot of questions. Miller said, “People want to know how the survivors we tracked down in the US felt about being here after knowing that the US had betrayed them the first time? The answer is not that different from most refugees, but with a bit of a bitter twist. In the end, they feel very grateful for having the chance to be here. Participants also ask what people did once they were here, what kinds of jobs they found, and whether they had families.”

“Questions always come up about Roosevelt and his relationship to the Jews. I always emphasize that things have to be looked at in context and consider the politics of the time. Roosevelt did not do enough to rescue Jews. And, just like today, in the choices our leaders are making, we consider the humanitarian interest versus the political interest. I try not to say things explicitly, which I hope is a take-away. The St. Louis is a relevant story and one of the reasons we wanted to do this detective work is because the lessons are still so applicable in our world today.”

The USC Shoah Foundation offers an IWitness Activity entitled, “The Voyage of the St. Louis: From Hope to Despair,” that features testimonies from survivors who were children on the ship and is an excellent complement to Miller’s work and Echoes and Reflections content.

Scott Miller started working with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1989, four years before it opened to the public. He was research historian for the museum’s Wexner Learning Center and then became program coordinator for its Research Institute. In 2001, he was appointed director of the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He also taught Jewish history at the American University in Washington DC and co-edited The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary.

In 2006, Miller coauthored a book with Sarah Ogilvie entitled, Refuge Denied — The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust. The product of ten years of research, the book traced the lives of the St. Louis passengers.

Carol Martin and Sarah Brown are Echoes and Reflections educators with years of experience teaching about Anne Frank in their classrooms. As a central component of their curriculum, they have developed sound strategies for teaching Anne Frank, which they share below.

They emphasize the importance of providing context, understanding what it means to be a bystander, and providing a safe space to ask questions. “My students love it,” Brown says. “They get so much out of it and years later they tell me that the Anne Frank unit is what they remember most from 8th grade.” Martin adds, “I feel strongly that I have to help my students really understand what it must have been like for her. These were peoples’ lives.”    

Preparation and Providing Context

Martin starts with a timeline. “It is like a KWL chart. I do this activity with photos from 1933-1945 and ask my students to put them in order. Then we rate the events from most significant to least significant. I find that using photos of people help students make the connection that these were peoples’ lives and the events we are learning about happened to them. I want to help my students connect on a personal level and pictures work well.”

Martin also emphasizes the importance of framing the historical context. “I provide an introduction to Nazi Germany where we start with the Treaty of Versailles and then move forward.” Helpful resources from Echoes and Reflections Lesson 3: Nazi Germany include - The Weimer Republic and the Rise of the Nazi Party, Europe before 1919, and Europe after 1919. “It is helpful to understand that Otto Frank chose the Netherlands because during World War I it had remained neutral and he thought they would be safe. He chose it strategically. Echoes and Reflections is great because you can pull the resources you need and the procedures organize it all for you step by step.”

Brown adds, “I like to show an excellent documentary called Anne Frank Remembered. It incorporates survivor testimony and gives a lot of background information about what it was like in Germany and what motivated the Frank family to leave and go to the Netherlands. It addresses Hitler’s invasion of the Netherlands and the integration of the Nuremberg Laws.”

In addition to helping students understand the political conditions that gave rise to fascism in Germany, both educators highlight the importance of helping students understand antisemitism. Brown shares, “It is really a study of racism and intolerance… Here in our rural district in upstate New York, I might be the first Jewish person my students have ever met so we get started with the basics.”

Both educators utilize Echoes and Reflections Lesson 2: Antisemitism resources including the Antisemitism Definition and Summary, and the map of Jewish Communities in Europe. Martin notes that she also references the illustrations from this lesson to demonstrate the use of propaganda. “I try and explain what the time period was like and help students consider what it might be like to hear antisemitic messages your whole life.”

Teaching Anne Frank: A Lesson in Taking Action

Building on the historical context, both Martin and Brown introduce their students to Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old girl who is roughly the same age as their students, by teaching the stage adaptation of the book. They find it better captures students’ attention and creates more opportunities for engagement.

Brown prints copies for all of her students and encourages them to take copious notes and write all over it as they work through the text together. “As we read it we emphasize the interaction between the people in hiding and that they could not have survived without Miep Gies. The people who helped the Frank family chose not to be bystanders. They chose to help because they believed that it was the right thing to do. We talk about this and contrast it to the majority of people during this time that chose to go along with the demands of the regime. What makes a person do what they do or don’t do? What was it in Miep’s values that caused her do what she thought was right and put herself at risk?”

To answer these questions, Brown and Martin utilize Echoes and Reflections Lesson 7: Rescuers and Non-Jewish Resistance. In an article adapted from a speech given by Miep Gies after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Anti-Defamation League she talks about Anne Frank’s Legacy.

Martin highlights that she likes to emphasize the lessons in Anne Frank’s story as having a lot to do with the choices people make. She uses Lesson 9: Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Bystanders directly from the Echoes and Reflections Teacher’s Resource Guide and Salitter’s Report in which he talks about the deportation of Jews. “This ties back to the end when Anne gets deported. As a class, we go back and talk about it. We also do a lot of collaborative work. I put my students in groups and have them talk things through with each other. Echoes and Reflections does a nice job of setting it all up for me and making these connections.”

Questions and Discussions

Martin shares that as an educator in a Catholic school her students often want to know more about the role of the church during the Holocaust. “Students always ask, ‘What did Pope Pius XII say and what was the Catholic response?’ It can be really hard to answer some of these questions and help students work through this material.”

Her students often ask personal questions about Anne Frank as well. They want to know how her hiding place was revealed, what happened to her afterwards when they got to Auschwitz, and how she died. “These are hard to answer because for a lot of them we don’t really know. We talk about Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and what that must have been like. I use Echoes and Reflections Lesson 5: The “Final Solution” to help answer some of these inquiries.”

She said that in her classroom they have started using an anonymous comment box. “This is a great way to make sure all the students questions are answered and gives me a chance to think through how I can best prepare a strong answer to those tough questions.”

Brown says, “My students have a lot of questions like, ‘Why did they kill the Jews? Why did they target them?’ In some ways, our course on Anne Frank and the Holocaust is an introduction to what human nature can be. I try to minimize the atrocities of it in class and put emphasis on what we can learn and what these lessons mean for our role in society today.”

Conclusion

After years of teaching the Holocaust, Martin shares that she has found it helpful to start by having a meeting with parents. Engaging parents as partners in the process of teaching this difficult material helps them prepare for some of the tough questions their children might have. “I tell them everything that we will be doing, reading, learning, and suggest that if their children have questions to please write them down and I’ll be happy to answer them in class.”

As an additional complement to this unit, Martin encourages her students to apply to the Chapman University Art and Writing Contest every year, which focuses on themes central to both the Holocaust and to ethical decision making.

Sarah Brown has taught 7-12th grade in the AuSable Valley Central School District for 25 years and currently teaches 8th grade. Carol Martin is a 6th-8th grade English and History teacher at Our Lady of Fatima Parish School in San Clemente, CA. She has been teaching about the Holocaust for 12 years.

How does one talk about liberation and the end of the Holocaust with students? Jill Rembrandt, Associate Project Director for Echoes and Reflections at the Anti-Defamation League, facilitates trainings for teachers. Kim Klett, a 12th grade English teacher in Mesa, Arizona, teaches an English elective called Holocaust Literature. They have been using Echoes and Reflections for nearly 10 years and, Kim uses Lesson 8: Survivors and Liberators in her classroom.

In this Q. and A., Jill and Kim discuss their approach to the topic of liberation and the way they utilize resources in the Teacher’s Resource Guide to facilitate meaningful and engaging conversation with students.

Q. Jill, how do you introduce the topic of liberation to educators?

A. In my trainings, I model teaching with testimony. I open up our conversation for discussion and we explore liberation and all its complexity together as if we were in a classroom. We ask tough questions, put ourselves in the survivors’ shoes, and think about this time from many angles.

When I teach educators about Lesson 8, I like to highlight the testimony from Anton Mason. He was in the same barrack as Elie Wiesel, and when Anton described the experience of being liberated he said, “We were free, but how will we live our lives without our family?”

This is a poignant moment that makes the complexity and mixed emotions of survivors apparent. Exploring this with students helps them understand the lasting impact and what it really meant to have survived.

Q. Kim, how do you prepare to teach students about liberation and survival? Can you share some best practices for getting comfortable with the material?

A. Echoes and Reflections is great because it condenses a lot of material for you and makes it accessible in one place. I recommend finding out what you don’t know, thinking about what you need to know, and then finding additional resources to fill in details and guide you. Look for the background and timeframe for the particular resources you’re teaching. Start small and then branch out from there.

Q. Kim, how do you talk about liberation and the end of the Holocaust with your students?

A. When students come in at the beginning we actually start with Darfur. I bring in present day examples so that students are aware that genocide is still happening. We learn the history of antisemitism and build a timeline on the wall to visualize the history.
In my class, we go from one book to another and I provide context along the way. “The Sunflower,” for example, deals with people’s feelings after liberation and the question of forgiveness. Should I forgive, can I forgive? I help students think about that. I share photos from Echoes and Reflections that guide our discussions.

Liberation is a really good time to talk about the role of the US in the Holocaust. I show my students Paul Parks’ testimony and we talk about the effect that liberating camps had on the young men in the armed forces. My students in ROTC are humbled to learn that for survivors, the soldiers were heroes. It is important for the kids in my class who will be enlisting to see the positive role that the military can play and has played historically.

The testimonies in Lesson 8 also highlight survivors talking about the pride they feel in being American. Gerda Klein, a local survivor in Arizona that I invite to my class, runs a group called Citizenship Counts that is inspired by her own immigrant experience. My immigrant students relate to these stories and feel connected to the sense of pride in being an American.

Q. Jill, what is important for educators to remember in helping students to think through the complexity that marked the end of the war?

A. Teachers have a chance to encourage students to dig into the psychological questions that come up for all the people involved in liberation. What was it that allowed people to move on and find a way to be happy again? Remembering that we facilitate the questioning and encourage the exploration is important in talking about the end of the war. It is always interesting to encourage both educators and students to think about the mental place survivors would have been in at this stage.

Q. Kim, what kinds of responses do you get from your students after they engage with this material? What kind of impact does it have on them?

A. I would say that for a lot of them our unit on liberation makes them proud of their country. For others, it motivates them to emulate the soldiers, to do the right thing, and try to help people in need. It is inspirational for sure, and for the kids it’s an eye opener. I want them to realize that genocide and the Holocaust is much more complex than people remember or think.

Jill Rembrandt is the Deputy Project Director for Echoes and Reflections. She resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Kim Klett has taught English at Dobson High School in Mesa, AZ since 1991. She teaches A.P. English Literature and Holocaust Literature.