Essay Contest theme announced

The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education is pleased to announce its seventeenth annual White Rose Student Essay Contest, open to 8th through 12th grade students in the 18 county Greater Kansas City area.

1942: Destruction of the Polish Ghettos

After the establishment of the death camp system in 1941, the full-scale destruction of the Polish ghettos commenced in 1942. By summer and early fall, massive deportations were under way and the Operation Reinhard camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), which were designated for the murder of those communities, were operating at full capacity.

Part A: Research the history of one Polish ghetto from the list below and explore the first-person testimony of at least one Jewish person who experienced or witnessed the deportation from that ghetto during 1942. Describe the conditions in the ghetto, the circumstances that deportation created for the Jewish community in that ghetto, and how the person you researched personally experienced the history you have described. Part B: How does learning about the Holocaust through the personal testimony of an individual make this history more meaningful to you? You must base your research on one of the following ghettos: Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, Lvov, Miedzyrzec, Prezemysl, Radom, Tarnów, Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Zamosc

Full details including teaching resources, entry forms and criteria are available on the MCHE website at www.mchekc.org/whiterosestudentessaycontest.

Children in the Holocaust and genocide

My 8^th graders have just finished studying the ghettos of Poland with emphasis on the Lodz ghetto. I had them view a documentary entitled The Lodz Ghetto which I found at the resource center at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. This video was divided into 4 parts with discussion questions for each one. This gave my students a great introduction and overview of the ghettos. I would certainly recommend this video for classes either to be seen in its entirety or in parts.
 

The next reading selection for my class will be Surviving Hitler. It is a memoir written by Andrea Warren about the experiences of Jack Mandelbaum, a local Holocaust survivor. There is a curriculum unit which can be found on the MCHE website which is very good. My past students gave great reviews on this book. They seemed to especially connect with the fact the Mr. Mandelbaum is from the Kansas City area. Of course, they all want to meet him after reading his memoir.

I will be ending my Holocaust unit with a lesson comparing and contrasting the diaries of two young people. The students will read excerpts from the Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, a young man who lived in the Lodz ghetto and the diary of Zlata Filipovic, who lived in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. This lesson is designed to connect lessons learned from the Holocaust with what has happened in the world since the end of World War II. I used this lesson last year and it was a success.