Complicate Your Thinking

When I signed up for MCHE’s four-day summer education seminar, “Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders,” I assumed it would be a chance for me to review and solidify my understanding of the Holocaust.

Well, the seminar ended up being a good reminder that it’s not wise to make assumptions, because I spent most of it “complicating my thinking.” Mitch Braff, executive director of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, used this phrase to encourage us to embrace the Holocaust’s complexities. The presenters made me question basic assumptions I had about the Holocaust. Here are some examples:

· By analyzing actual train shipments, noted historian Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt challenged the commonly held belief that the Germans diverted resources from the Eastern Front to murder Jews. According to his research, in 1944 at the height of the Hungarian deportation, only ten of every 25,000 trains running each day in Europe were designated for the deportation of Jews.

· Dr. Severin Hochberg, a former historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, discussed the extent to which the Catholic Church, and specifically Pope Pius XII, was a bystander.

· On the final day, we explored the role of Jewish partisans in the war and the ethical issues they faced.

This seminar did complicate my thinking, but in a good way. Participating in these discussions reminded me that history is about real people, and it must be understood with all of its complexities to do it justice.

Alfred Lerner Fellow Summer Institute for Teachers

This is a guest blog by Terry Beasley, an educator at Lakeview Middle School in the Park Hill School District. This summer Terry was MCHE's representative to the Alfred Lerner Summer Institute for Teachers held by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous.

__________________________________________________________________________________

I headed to New York on June 25, 2011 to participate in the Alfred Lerner Fellow Summer Institute for Teachers.  I was one of 35 educators selected for this prestigious program held on the campus of Columbia University.  I was looking forward to gaining new knowledge and instructional strategies that I could use in my classroom during our studies of the Holocaust.  I had completed my assigned readings, completed my pre-institute assignments, and had my suitcase packed.  

My experience with the Alfred Lerner Fellowship Institute was more than I could have imagined.  The caliber of instructors and presenters during the week was exceptional.   I was very fortunate to have this opportunity. 

Professor John Roth gave a historical history of the evolution of anti-Semitism based on the religious differences throughout history.  Professor Volker Berghahn discussed the interwar period in Germany and the impact of World War I on all the nations, which helped clarify the mindset of the various nations.  Professor Harry Reicher, University of Pennsylvania Law School, gave an amazing and very insightful presentation on how Hitler and the Nazi regime used the law to manipulate Germany and its citizens.  I found this session extremely interesting because it clarified how the Nazi Party was able to use the legal system as a tool or vehicle to obtain the goals of the Nazi organization.  Professor Peter Hayes discussed the use of big business by the Nazi government and really explained how businesses became involved and then immersed in the crimes of the Nazis.  Henry Feingold addressed the issue of refugees and the responses of individuals and countries to this world crisis.  Professor Jeffrey Burds did an excellent presentation on the use of propaganda by the Nazi regime.  Much of the information that Professor Burds shared was new documentation that he has been researching in recent years.  This new evidence shows how the Nazis targeted propaganda for different regions of Europe to personalize anti-Semitism in specific areas.  

Sheila Hanson from the Shoah Foundation instructed us on how to access IWitness to access the visual history testimonies of over 52,000 individuals from 56 countries.  These resources can be used in a variety of ways by teachers or by students.  Roman Kent shared his personal story of his life and survival before, during and after the Holocaust.  He stressed that any study of the Holocaust should include who the people were before and who they were afterwards.    Mr. Kent was so personable and his story was quite emotional.  The author and instructor Nechama Tec shared her personal testimony and then led a question and answer session regarding her books she started writing in 1970 when her memories started becoming an issue for her.  

Our final day was spent with Robert Jan van Pelt, who traveled to Germany in the fall of 1989 following the fall of the Berlin Wall to search the archives of Nazi Germany.  Professor van Pelt told many fascinating accounts of his experiences with Holocaust research and documentation. 

Another aspect of this experience was the connections and friendships that evolved.  I met many passionate and dedicated educators from all parts of the United States who are dedicated to teaching the truth about this historical event.  I had the pleasure of sharing my room with Katarzyna from Minsk, Poland.  We had four educators from Poland, one journalist who works at Auschwitz, one employee from the United Nations, and two educators from Croatia in our fellowship.  The opportunity to discuss and collaborate with educators from these areas was so insightful and meaningful as we shared teaching strategies, as well as historical perspectives.  It was a wonderful group of individuals with whom I will continue to communicate with in the future.  

On a personal note, my selection as the recipient of the Eduard Sonder Award was extremely impacting for me.  Based on my application, the granddaughters of Mr. Sonder select the recipient of this annual award.  I met both of the granddaughters, as well as a great-granddaughter and a great-great granddaughter while I was attending the ALF Institute in New York.  I had an opportunity to visit with all of them following a presentation.  I was given a copy of the family story, a copy of a family photograph of Eduard Sonder, and a box of chocolates from the same Swiss Chocolatier that Mr. Sonder would bring to his granddaughters from his business travels when the family lived in Germany.  Both of the granddaughters are such delightful ladies and I was so humbled that they selected me.  

I am thankful for the opportunity to have been an Alfred Lerner Fellow and to those who encouraged me to apply, as well as to those who helped support my journey.  I believe that I am better equipped as a teacher to help my students understand the depth and the impact of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz In The Courtroom

Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, the world’s leading authority on Auschwitz, addresses the trials that brought Auschwitz into the courtroom in this podcast of his July 19, 2011 presentation at the Jewish Community Campus.

Dr. van Pelt served as an expert witness for Deborah Lipstadt’s defense team in the suit brought against her by Holocaust denier David Irving in 2000.  The author of numerous books and articles, Dr. van Pelt is currently a professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Unique Summer Course

Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders

July 18-21, 2011
8:30-4:00

Jewish Community Campus
5801 W. 115th Street
Overland Park, Kansas

REGISTER BY JULY 1, 2011 TO RECEIVE
YOUR COURSE BOOK BY MAIL!

 This one time only graduate-level course examines the roles of Jewish victims, perpetrators, bystanders, the Allies and neutrals in the Holocaust. The course will feature lectures by guest historians, content-based readings, primary source analysis, survivor testimony, group discussion, and practical application for 7th-12th grade classrooms.

SCHEDULE OF SPEAKERS
July 18-19 will feature presentations by internationally-renowned Auschwitz expert Dr. Robert Jan Van Pelt. Through lecture and discussion, based on his book Holocaust: A History, he will focus on the responses of Jewish victims and perpetrators.

July 20 will feature presentations by Dr. Severin Hochberg, formerly of the Senior Historian’s Office at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and currently teaching in the history department at George Washington University. His sessions will include an in-depth analysis of the international response to the Holocaust - including a focus on refugee issues and bystanders - and the responses of the churches to the Holocaust.

July 21 will feature Mitch Braff, executive director of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF). Through the use of web-based testimonies, he will bring participants’ focus back to Jewish responses to the Holocaust, specifically armed and unarmed resistance. 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION
The course includes pre-reading for the sessions. Readings will be mailed to those who register by Friday, July 1, 2011.

A registration fee of $75, payable to MCHE, covers lunch on site Monday and Tuesday, course materials, including Robert Jan Van Pelt’s book, Holocaust: A History as well as curriculum materials and a DVD of partisan testimony from JPEF. Snacks and beverages will be provided each day, with lunch on your own Wednesday and Thursday.

Two hours of optional graduate credit will be available from Baker University. A separate enrollment fee of $100, payable to Baker University, will be collected on the first day of class.

CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION FORM AND COMPLETE INFORMATION!

Utilizing picture books in Holocaust studies

Three books covering separate topics related to World War II and Holocaust study can provide quick and engaging introductory experiences for students—Passages to Freedom, Baseball Saved Us, and Through Eva’s Eyes. All three have websites providing additional information and/or supporting curriculum which can save teacher-time and provide creative, cross-curricular activities for classroom use.

In her May 8 blog post, Jennifer Jenkins discussed using a short story about Chiune Sugihara, a rescuer from Japan, with her middle school students. The picture book entitled Passage to Freedom – The Sugihara Story by Ken Mochizuki with illustrations by Dom Lee was published in 1997. It received many awards including the ALA Notable Book Award.

Sugihara’s story is told through his young son’s eyes. The focus is on Sugihara’s actions to save Jews while a member of the Japanese government diplomatic service stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1940. At risk to himself and his family (and against his orders from the Japanese government), Sugihara wrote hundreds of visas daily for about a month until he was forced to leave for Germany for reassignment. The story clearly illustrates how Sugihara and his family decided to help the refugees—how Sugihara and his wife had told their son to “think as if I were in someone else’s place.”

The afterword, written by Sugihara’s son, tells of his father’s life after the war. He was forced to resign from the diplomatic service when the family returned to Japan. He was eventually chosen to receive the “Righteous Among Nations” Award from Yad Vashem in 1985 and continued to hear from many of those he helped to survive.

Students certainly learn from this story that one person can make a difference. On the back cover above a picture of Sugihara and his young son is a Jewish Proverb: “If you save the life of one person, it is as if you saved the world entire.”

A Teacher’s Guide can be found online with suggested lessons for most subject areas (including ESL—the book is available in Spanish).

Sample Activity for Art:
Study the illustrations in the book. Why did the artist use brown (sepia) tones instead of bright colors? What moods do the illustrations create? How do people’s hands help explain the story?

The pictures are stunning. They were created by applying “encaustic beeswax” on paper. The illustrator then scratched out the images and applied oil paint to add color.

Students can also listen to a Book Talk by the author where he discusses his process for writing the book and the theme of moral choice.

An earlier book written by Ken Mochizuki and illustrated by Dom Lee is entitled Baseball Saved Us. This story was inspired by the author’s parents’ experiences in a Japanese internment camp in the U.S. during WWII. Note—technically, this is historical fiction. A Classroom Guide provides many interesting follow-up activities to help the students process the story and its setting. (I would not use the first Social Studies activity as USHMM Guidelines for Teaching the Holocaust do not recommend comparing experiences in this way.) I used the book to pique student interest and help them generate questions about the internment camps—students were not familiar with this piece of American history for the most part. Once they wanted to learn more, we read a story entitled “Home Was a Horsestall.”

This story was included as one of fourteen in a magazine from a kit (The Shadow of Hate) which I received from The Southern Poverty Law Center – Teaching Tolerance. The major theme of the kit was intolerance found in American history. One objective was to show students aspects of our own history that may not typically be studied in depth and from which we certainly need to learn lessons. I included information about Japanese internment in a study of the Holocaust for several reasons—most importantly to show that hatred and intolerance can occur anywhere, including our own country, and that we need to know how to fight against those actions. Classroom Activities can be found here.

Sample Activity:
Choose an item that defines you culturally. Bring it to school with you. Explain to the class why this article is important to you and how you would feel if you had to part with this item for an indefinite period of time.

Phoebe Unterman began this book when she was thirteen years old. She wanted to tell the story of her grandmother’s experiences as a young girl (from age six to through twelve) during the Holocaust. Her grandmother and her family are living in Lodz, Poland, at the beginning of the story. As German soldiers occupy her town and Jewish freedoms are taken away, the story is told through the grandmother’s voice. She remembers wearing the yellow star, being forced to quit school, and eventually being sent to the ghetto. The family is ordered on a packed train to Stutthof. Eva and her mother are separated from her father and sent to work in a munitions factory in Dresden. When Dresden is bombed, they are moved to Theresienstadt where, soon after, they are liberated by the Russians. Mother, Father, and Eva are reunited.

The story will certainly encourage student interest and questions about Eva’s experiences. The author-illustrator’s delicate, detailed paintings are beautiful complements to the story. Have students research photos of the various ghettos and camps and compare them to the paintings in the book.

Additional information can be found at the author-illustrator’s website.

The book was created as an entry in the 2006 National Kids-in-Print Contest for Students sponsored by Landmark House, Ltd. in Kansas City, Kansas. This contest was inspired by David Melton, author of Written and Illustrated by . . . . I could not find any information about the contest existing beyond 2010, but information for 2011 just may not be posted yet.

Written and Illustrated by . . . is a fun, step-by-step guide to helping students write, illustrate, and bind their own books. The finished products created by my students always amazed me. While none of my students ever won the Landmark Editions contests, the librarian always purchased the winning books each year so we could enjoy them in class. Writing and illustrating a book can certainly give a real-world audience and purpose to not only a fiction creation, but also a well-researched non-fiction book such as Through Eva’s Eyes.

All three books present interesting situations and people to discuss in relation to the universal theme of “man’s inhumanity to man.” The artwork provides an additional avenue for visual understanding and discussion.

art:21 - Classroom Resources

The PBS series, art:21 (art in the 21^st century), provides excellent teaching resources for several themes associated with Holocaust education. Free educators’ guide pdfs are downloadable from the website. Hard copies are available, by request, for seasons 3-5. The website is rich with short theme-specific video clips of the artists working and talking about their creative process; artists’ interviews; complete video features; an educators’ blog; and hundreds of lesson plan ideas. As with all video, please be sure and preview for content appropriateness before showing to students. Here are just a few examples of artists and subjects related to Holocaust studies:

Krzystof Wodiczko – Monuments, Collective Memory, Peace, Power
Wodiczko projects live feed, victim video testimony on buildings and monuments. He hopes to promote peace by publicly protesting violence and aesthetically reflecting collective memory. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1943, Krzystof explains: “My mother, being a Jew whose entire family was killed in Poland during [the] ghetto uprising, gave birth to me in the midst of all of this – my childhood was on the ruins of war; physical, political, and perhaps moral, definitely psychological.” Much like Margaret Bourke-White’s camera while photographing the horrors of concentration camp life, Mr. Wodiczko’s sketchbook acts as a buffer between him and his subject matter. Krzystof admits he cannot relive each story as he hears it, because of the trauma it might trigger. So he sketches, and re-sketches, designing his video installations. Wodiczko’s work has received many awards and honors including the Hiroshima Art Prize for contributing to world peace.

Layhal Ali – Political Resistance, Bullying, Racial Inequality, Protesting Violence, Power
A person of color growing up “in an all-white school,” Ali creates abstract human-like figures in poses that are evocative of victimization, dominance, subservience, resistance, and protection. Her series of brown-skinned, gender-neutral figures named Greenheads engage the viewer in identity questioning with their stylized masks, weapons, wounds, and armor. She talks about how cruel the game of dodge ball is on a school playground, and asks intriguing questions about the physical properties of color and perception with regard to racism. In the video clip about characters and color, she ventures “Sometimes I wonder, is that what it is about . . . dark-skinned people? - their face absorbs more lights so you have to look into them more? They are more mysterious? I mean . . . what is it?? . . . Could racism be just attributed to bizarre visual phenomena, you know? . . . There’s a question!”

Jenny Holzer – Censorship, Media, Government’s Role Holzer’s work, she confesses, “ focuses on cruelty in hopes that people will recoil.” She creates moving typography projections; word and image installation pieces; and signage that make people think about what they are NOT seeing, reading, and hearing. He artwork publicly questions authority and proclaims aphorisms such as “abuse of power comes as no surprise.” One of her studio projects recreates a series of redacted government documents, enlarged and presented in lovely, colored, jumbo silkscreened prints.

Matthew Ritchie – The Individual in Society, Conformity, Hope
Ritchie works with line, and large-scale graphic installation, to make ideas tangible. His sculpture piece which he refers to as a “human cell,” shows how people often imprison themselves; in their own thoughts, words, ideas, or even possessions. It is formed from a series of intricately designed and elaborately cut metal plates that interlock and intersect to create a void in the middle, just the right size for an adult human body to slip in and be visible, but immobilized. The cell evokes a type of cocoon or globe that completely traps an individual. Ritchie fashioned the husk, or human shell out of drawings that he enlarged and then transferred by computer to a metal smith, who in turn, cut them with a high-power jigsaw. Marks become monumental as these large, round, flat metal planes meet at the x, y, and z axes, creating a massive globe-like structure at least ten feet in diameter. The video features several of his other animated, but flat, calligraphic linear creations. Some of them are only inches thick, but sprawl all over a gallery at different levels off the ground. What Mr. Ritchie manages to accomplish is to make tangible what typically falls into the realm of pure emotion, mark-making, movement, and flow. Thinking takes on form and ideas become concrete. What if ideas about combating indifference and intolerance could take on form and become REAL enough that students could better “deal” with them? How could we motivate students to name and make real the aspects of human behavior that lead to marginalization, hatred, bullying, and we/they mentality? Once concrete, could these ideas then be destroyed, or publicly displayed in protest, for healing, hope, and re-creation?

Banned and Burned Books

Last Tuesday night I had the privilege of viewing the traveling exhibit from USHMM called Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum. If you’ve never seen this exhibit it’s sobering to say the least. The primary source photos and text focus on the book burnings of May 10, 1933 and America’s response to this tragedy. I overheard someone at the viewing say “It’s too bad America wasn’t as upset about the people burning later as they were when the Nazis burned the books!” How sad but true. However, my part in the evening, as a middle school librarian, was to speak about book burning in America today and comparing it to the Nazis destruction of eventually 100 million books throughout Occupied Europe in their 12 year reign.

I work with my 6^th – 8^th graders every year through our “Right to Read” lessons in September. So I had lots of insight into challenges and bannings that go on in this country. I also teach my students why these books are offensive to some people. These same people then work to have these books removed from libraries not just for their own children but for everyone’s! Thankfully these folks are rarely successful but that’s because we have a 1^st Amendment and the ALA (American Library Association).

Preparing and delivering this presentation, I was struck by the similarities between the Nazis and their reasons for burning books almost 80 years ago and our reasons today: Homosexuality/sexual content and profanity, Un-German/Un-American, not age appropriate/degenerate. I was also amazed at how shocked most of my audience was when they saw the ALA’s Top 10 List of most challenged books in 2009. The titles and reasons were absurd in many cases and people’s nervous laughter made me realize the importance of my words that evening.

Awareness is everything and avoiding book burnings in our own country takes our vigilance and constant attention. As the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, once said, and it can’t be said enough, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”