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!

No Place on Earth

Recently I came across a story of hiding during the Holocaust that I had never heard before. The film chronicling this story is entitled “No Place on Earth” (http://www.noplaceonearthfilm.com/). 

The film, part documentary and part dramatization, follows the efforts of five Ukrainian Jewish families (38 men, women and children) who sought refuge from the war in a cave. They spent a total of 511 days underground. The men ventured into the night to collect food, supplies and chop firewood. The girls and women never left; surviving underground longer than anyone in recorded history.

In the 1990s American caver Chris Nicola came across items in the cave. After doing research he discovered the remarkable story of survival. The film also shows four of the survivors returning to the caves that hid them. This film is a great addition to the stories of Jewish survival from the Holocaust. All survival stories contain amazing elements but this adds another dimension. I was caught up in the story of these people, families no less, who crawled in and out of these caves through narrow crevices that are claustrophobic inducing.   

CLICK HERE for an information quest activity from IWitness related to the movie.

Lesson plan on personalizing the Holocaust

With the implementation of Common Core and 1:1 initiative of I-pads, presenting classroom lessons is continuously changing.  With emphasis being placed on nonfiction reading, writing and researching, I utilized my trip to Poland and Germany to challenge students.  Therefore, the youtube video is an introduction to real people, real places and real events.  Nonfiction stories of Holocaust survivors, prisoners of concentration camps or extermination camps, righteous rescuers, and liberators spread their messages through autobiographies, biographies, chronicles, documentaries, movies, poetry, plays, oral traditions, testimonies and interviews.  

Therefore, this movie reflects her personal experience visiting historical sights at Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp, Treblinka Death Camp, and Buchenwald Concentration Camp.  The people highlighted in the video are listed in order of appearance.  In 1941, Maximilian Kolbe, Polish Franciscan priest, volunteered to take the place of family man Francizcek Gajowniczek, one of ten selected men to die. Local Kansas City man Colonel Keith Schmedemann, was a liberator of Buchenwald in 1945.  Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Winner for his memoir NIGHT, was among the thousands who were liberated by the United States Army.  Dr. Janusz Korczak established an orphanage for 200 children that were relocated to the Warsaw Ghetto.  Instead of seeking freedom for himself, Janusz Korczak  went with the orphans to Treblinka Death Camp.  Karol Wojtyla, also known as Pope John Paul II, grew up playing with his Jewish friends Zygmunt, Leopold, Poldek and Jerzy Kluger who molded his boyhood experiences in Wadowice, Poland. 

Another group, righteous rescuers, are non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.  Five brief stories are told.  One is of a rescuer and a survivor.  In 1940, Maria and her mother saved Janina, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Warsaw.  Inspired by her father to help those less fortunate, Irena Sendler was head of the children’s section of Zegota---the Polish Underground Council for aid to Jews.  A chair like many others on the brick road symbolizes Oskar Schindler’s ingenuity and contribution to help save Jews. Oskar Schindler, German industrialist, employed cheap Jewish labor at his Krakow factory. These righteous rescuers are just a few of many whose stories continue to be told.

Through reading, researching and talking with scholars, survivors, righteous rescuers, and liberator, I continue to strive for understanding.  Therefore, teaching the Holocaust challenges me to integrate the choices of victims and rescuers of the past into the future, our children.   

Respectfully submitted by  Kimberly Klein on October 28, 2013.  The lesson is outlined below:

Learning Target:  To apply reading and writing skills to comprehend, analyze and evaluate

OBJECTIVE:  Students will watch Youtube video “Holocaust: Memories of the Past Spoken to the Heart” of historical sites, people, and events that I created for student introduction.  The genre is nonfiction.

ACTIVITIES:

1. As a class, students will read Surviving Hitler by Andrea Warren. 
2.  Students will take notes on the real people, real places, real events,conflict and attributes/flaws 
3. Students will organize information (events) in a timeline
4. Students will research in the USHMM website -The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a reliable website and is recognized internationally 
5.  Using the website, students will research a liberator, righteous rescuer, survivor, or victim 
6. Students will record information about person—also referring to documents, testimonies, biographies, photographs, letters, interviews 
7.  Students will analyze information.  This process includes paraphrasing information, summarizing, connecting, reflecting and drawing conclusions. 
8.  Students will write a “How to inform” paper on the “Said” topic 
9.  Students will include bibliography that demonstrates how to cite sources

ASSESSMENT:  Students will present findings and how they accomplished the task to the class

EVALUATION:  Progress will be monitored from baseline reading, researching, analyzing and citing from introduction.

Therefore, learning about the people, places and events of the Holocaust will allow students to develop critical thinking skills, to make connections from the past to the present, and to learn how to access information.

Teachers guide and exhibition on Jewish resistance

The Museum of Jewish Heritage has an interesting website with a very good resource for teachers.  From 2007-2008 they sponsored an exhibit called "Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust."  While the exhibit has long since closed, the website is still open and a teacher's guide is still available.

Asking students to think about what resistance entails when teaching about the Holocaust is an important topic.  While people might think of armed rebellion as the only form of true resistance, resistance goes much deeper than that. 

Smuggling bread, teaching in secret, or rescuing a Torah scroll were all examples of resistance too.  This teacher's guide provides background information, developed lessons, and lots of primary sources.

I find one of the most interesting parts of the guide to be a lesson on ethical wills.  We might think of a will as a way of dividing up our personal belongings after we pass away, but an ethical will is about putting your values and beliefs on paper.  It challenges students to think about what is really important in life and how even attempting to pass along your values is a form of resistance.