Women's history month - how did women experience the Holocaust?

In honor of Women's History month, in March MCHE features six female survivors- Judy Jacobs, Sonia Golad, Ida Loeffler, Erika Mandler, Bronia Roslawowski and Mania Weindling. Visit us at www.mchekc.org/survivors to read these and other profiles of Holocaust survivors!

Local Survivor Testimony - In Hiding

Tonight  Jeff Benes and I will be presenting a lesson on “In Hiding” as part of Telling the Story: Teaching With Witness Testimony ~ A Seminar Series for Middle and High School Educatorsat the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.  As I viewed the testimonies of 4 local survivors for this segment, I was greatly affected by their recollections.

One in particular stood out in my mind.  Ralph Berets was two or three years old when he and his family were forced to leave their home in Amersfoort, Holland and go into hiding.  They lived for several months in a cottage that was owned by one of his father’s friends.  The Germans were informed of their presence and the family hid in a ditch until the soldiers left.  The family was forced to split up.  Ralph and his mother were hiding in an ice cream shop, where he always had something to eat.    

Other memories were of his parents’ playing cards with German soldiers and a grenade that was thrown into a window but did not explode.  They lived in a chicken coop with 12 other people and Ralph remembered the strong odor of the chickens.  Maybe his young age made his testimony so compelling to me.

It was interesting to study the different perspectives of the four survivors, not only in their ages but where they lived.  Margalith Clarenberg was 15 when she went into hiding in Holland. When Ann Walters was 13 years old, she was left with a farmer in Poland.  Maria Devinki lived in Wodzislaw, Poland.  She was a slave laborer.  She was released from the camp through the efforts of a Polish soldier who was a friend of a high school acquaintance.  He would be their protector for the next two years.  She was 23 years old when she, her husband, 2 brothers and her mother went into hiding.  She was 25 when the Soviets liberated Poland. 

I plan to use these four testimonies with my students as a lesson in perseverance as part of my Holocaust unit. You can find the documentary at the MCHE Resource Center and later this summer you can find the lesson plans we are teaching tonight on the MCHE website!

Number the Stars as performed at the Coterie Theatre

Lois Lowry won her first Newbery Award for this book set in Denmark during the Holocaust. The book explores many universal themes including bravery, friendship, and human decency as well as Holocaust topics including rescuers, hiding, perpetrators, resistance, and antisemitism. While the book’s focus is on the two young friends, Annemarie and Ellen, the play is often focused on a young member of the Resistance. Peter (who would have been Annemarie’s brother-in-law had her sister not been killed in her work with the Resistance) provides important details about the history of Denmark and the work of the Resistance members there.

The play is well-acted. Actresses a bit older than their characters convincingly play the three young girls. The supporting cast is believable in their roles as either perpetrators or rescuers. The set is a simple but fascinating one. On the stage are a table, chairs, and a trunk. But the backdrop is constantly changed to show a variety of settings using wall-sized Etch-A-Sketch-like drawings. The audience of middle-school students was fully engaged in the action. The hour-length play was well-written and represented the key concepts and characters in the book very closely.

Like Laura Patton (see her January 17 post), I would prefer to use non-fiction over novels or historical fiction. But there are many effective ways to use a book like Number the Stars (a quick, engaging read for most 6-8^th grade students). Students can study the literary aspects of the book, how the author researched and incorporated the history of the Holocaust in Denmark, and then research the historical aspects themselves. Once students research events presented in the book, they become interested in knowing about other, related events and people.

MCHE, as the education partner of The Coterie Theatre for this play, provides Number the Stars Educational Materials.

There are dozens of online sites providing educational activities to use with the book. Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site provides discussion ideas, activities, and related books. This is one site that shows creative ways to incorporate a novel into historical curriculum.

Lois Lowry's Blog provides useful insights about the book and her research.

In the Afterword of the book, Lowry addresses the question “How much of Annemarie’s story is true?” This is a wonderful section to use with students to pique their interest in the history portrayed in the book. The playwright (Douglas W. Larche) uses this section to create a moving letter from Peter read at the end of the play:

            “… the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift that our country hungers for,   something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of — something he can work and fight for.”

I think there are many teachable moments and valuable concepts in this book and in the play that can easily lead to a study of the history of the Holocaust and the memoirs, poetry, and artwork of its victims.

Age Appropriateness for Teaching the Holocaust

Back in February, my sister copied me on an email to her daughter’s teacher. My niece, who is in 4^th grade, was having nightmares about Hitler and the concentration camps. She had woken three nights in a row, trembling and crying. My sister was curious why this was being taught in a 4^th grade classroom to students who are not developmentally ready for this information. To the teacher’s credit, she was not teaching the Holocaust but a group of students had been reading a graphic book, complete with photos, which had been checked out of the school library.

Thank goodness this was not a part of the curriculum! My niece’s reaction is a great illustration of why the Holocaust should not be taught until middle school. Our children seem so grown up in so many ways these days, that it might seem that they can handle these realities. In actuality, most children cannot rationalize that these events are not going to play out in our country and that they and their families are safe from these atrocities. It is absolutely important that we teach our youth this history so that they know it CAN happen if we don’t protect the rights of every group but it needs to be done in a responsible way and at an appropriate time.

The following is what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says about Age Appropriateness:

Students in grades 6 and above demonstrate the ability to empathize with individual eyewitness accounts and to attempt to understand the complexities of this history, including the scope and scale of the events. While elementary students are able to empathize with individual accounts, they often have difficulty placing them in a larger historical context. Such demonstrable developmental differences have traditionally shaped social studies curricula throughout the country; in most states, students are not introduced to European history and geography—the context of the Holocaust—before middle school. Elementary school can be an ideal location to begin discussion of the value of diversity and the danger of bias and prejudice. These critical themes can be addressed through local and national historical events; this will be reinforced during later study of the Holocaust.

Hopefully, as a response to this incident, the librarian has been alerted and replaced the book with age appropriate materials. I love the thought that there are so many well-meaning teachers out there, excited to teach their younger students about the importance of inclusion and the dangers of exclusion. My hope is that these lessons will be taught in ways that are appropriate for the age group.

An image is worth a thousand words... at least

Lately I have been working with photos more and more in the classroom. (I was inspired by a recent conference I attended.) I like taking a photo or painting and separating it out into many sections. I literally print out the image and cut it into multiple sections.; maybe 5 or 6 pieces. (I will print out the image 5 times and cut each printout into the same 6 different pieces so each student can have a section of the image.) I try to pick photos that are complex and have a lot going on in them.

I suggest the image below that could be used for dissection. In fact, if you CLICK HERE, there are enlarged sections of this image ready for you to print off.



You could ask students things like:
What is going on in this section?
How are people dressed?
Who do you think painted this image?
What is the mood of the section?
What is the quality of the art?

I put each section up on the Powerpoint, one piece at a time, and ask those students who have that piece to talk about what they saw. In the end I put the entire photo up and ask if there is different meaning with all of the pieces put together.

I think this might be an interesting way to introduce the Holocaust. This photo is actually a mural that was in the common area of the children's barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

You could talk about what type of supplies might have been readily available to paint this mural. How is the painting of this mural a form of defiance? How might this be a way for the young people to cope with their situation?

An activity like this can usually be done in less than 20 minutes as an introduction to a lesson or unit of study. It is a real attention grabber and students tend to mentally associate the image with the lesson.

Providing context for Anne Frank

I was careening through a Barnes and Noble store recently on a mission for something else when the image of Anne Frank on the cover of a book almost caused me to give myself a case of whiplash. I executed an abrupt U-turn and went back to the display table to take a look. The book that attracted my attention and made its way into my shopping bag that day was Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography. Sid Jacobson is the author of the text and Ernie Colón created the graphics. This 149 page book reads like a graphic novel and appeals to middle and high school students – especially those who are reluctant readers.

The biography is divided into ten chapters that tell the familiar story of Anne, her family, and the other residents of the Secret Annex. However, there are many details in the book that I did not know. For example the first chapter tells the history of Otto Frank’s and Edith Holländer’s families; I learned that Otto Frank worked at Macy’s department store in New York City for a couple of years before WWI. The ninth chapter tells how the residents of the Secret Annex were arrested and what happened to them following their arrests. I learned that Otto tried to convince Peter Van Pels to hide with him in the infirmary at Auschwitz; however, Peter decided to evacuate the camp as the Russians drew close in January 1945. The tenth chapter tells about Otto’s life after the war, the publication of Anne’s diary, and the creation of The Anne Frank House.

Throughout the book, the creators have provided background information to help the reader understand Anne’s story in the larger context of WWII and the Holocaust. The second chapter is devoted to explaining the rise of Nazi party in Germany. Maps are provided in several places. There are pages titled “Snapshot” that illuminate in text and graphics concepts such as Germany in World War I, the Nuremberg Laws, Concentration Camps, the Wannsee Conference, and the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. There are smaller frames tucked throughout the book that give background information about other important events such as Germany’s acquisition of territory without war between 1935 and 1938, Kristallnacht, Operation Barbarossa and the Einsatzgruppen, and the evacuation of the Danish Jews. The last pages of the book feature a chronology and a list of print and web resources for further reading.

This book would be an excellent addition to school libraries and to the personal libraries of educators who teach about Anne Frank.

Reference:
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón. Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

New Lesson Plans

The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education is pleased to announce the addition of several new lesson plans to it's website at www.mchekc.org/lessonplans. Written by members of the Isak Federman Holocaust Teaching Cadre, these lessons explore relevant connections between the Holocaust and at least one other modern genocide. The lessons added to date are:

·         Bystanders in the Holocaust and Rwanda
This lesson explores testimony of bystanders to the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide. It encourages students to understand what it means to be a bystander and to refrain from being one in the future.

·         Document Based Question on Resistance in the Holocaust and Rwanda
This document based question explores resistance in both the Holocaust and Rwanda. It is designed to allow students to practice all the necessary DBQ skills while learning about the Holocaust. Approaches to deconstructing the DBQ and utilizing the documents in other settings are explored.

·         Children's Genocide Diaries - Bitton-Jackson and Zlata's Diaries
Utilizing the memoir I Have Lived A Thousand Years (Holocaust) and Zlata's Diary (Bosnia), this lesson plan allows students to analyze and explore the impact of genocide on children.

·         Children's Genocide Diaries - Sierakowiak and Zlata's Diaries
Utilizing The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (Holocaust) and Zlata's Diary (Bosnia), this lesson plan allows students to analyze and explore the impact of genocide on children.

·         Children of Genocide: Communicating Through Art
This lesson plan helps students analyze art created by children during the Holocaust and the genocide in Darfur.

·         Connecting a Holocaust Memoir Study to Modern Genocides
This lesson plan helps students make relevant connections amongst genocides by utilizing first hand testimony of genocide survivors and witnesses at the conclusion of any Holocaust memoir study.

·         Propaganda in the Holocaust and Rwanda
This unit explores propaganda utilized by a variety of media outlets in both the Holocaust and Rwanda. It was specifically designed to help middle school students learn about the elements of propaganda and their effective use, but has wide applications in high school and history settings.

Witness to Genocide: The Children of Rwanda

In a recent class (one of a series sponsored by MCHE entitled Relating the Holocaust to Other Genocides: A Seminar Series for Educators), a fellow cadre member Dianne O’Bryan shared drawings from Witness to Genocide. I had been preparing a lesson for the class comparing/contrasting the artwork of children from Terezin with the artwork of children from Darfur. I decided to explore the children’s art from Rwanda as shown in this book.

As a middle school English teacher, I looked for resources that were engaging, historically relevant, and easily adapted for use in one or two class periods to enhance our study of the Holocaust. Witness to Genocide provides two short introductory pieces, one by Hillary Clinton and one by Richard Salem, that can be used to generate student discussion about the importance of sharing the story of the genocide in Rwanda and to show how art can be used as testimony and healing.

The three main sections in the book (The Genocide, The Children, and The Future of Rwanda) tell the history of the genocide the effects of trauma on children, and the importance of remembering as these children face the future. The captioned artwork supplements the text and acts as witness testimony and a healing process for the children. The simple, yet powerful drawings will engage those who see them and will encourage students to learn about the past and ways to help secure a better future for these children and other victims of traumatic experiences.

Witness to Genocide is available in the resource center at MCHE. Supporting lesson plans can be found at http://www.mchekc.org/lessonplans.

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.