Surviving Hitler through Common Core

Last school year the middle school language arts departments in my school district were allotted money to purchase instructional materials. Our directive was to fill gaps between the materials we were currently using and the increased demands of the Common Core Standards – particularly in areas such as non-fiction. One of the texts my colleagues and I chose for our 8^th grade students was Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps by Andrea Warren. I just began teaching this “new” book last week.

Surviving Hitler is a biography by Andrea Warren, a Kansas City area author, about JackMandelbaum, a Holocaust survivor who rebuilt his life in the Kansas City area after WWII. Incidentally, Jack is one of the co-founders of the Midwest Centerfor Holocaust Education. The book has won many awards including the William Allen White Award and Children’s Choice Literature Award; it also was named an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book. It is available in print, e-book, and audiobook form. Teaching materials and classroom sets of the bookare available from MCHE (registration required). The suggestions in this teaching guide are helpful but were created before the implementation of the Common Core Standards; they are probably in need of an update. Jack’s video testimony is available from MCHE and he is featured in the DVD The Holocaust: Through Our Own Eyes produced by MCHE.

In addition, Andrea Warren has recently written The Author's Guide to Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps and its Alignment with the Common Core Standards. It is available as a paperback for $9.99 through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. It is also available everywhere as an e-book and retails for $9.99. In her Author’s Guide, Warren explains the process of writing the biography and decisions she made as a writer. Throughout her guide Warren addresses Common Core Standards from the writer’s point-of-view; I found it invaluable.

As I prepared to teach the book, I needed to think about how to align my instructional methods with the Common Core Standards. In the “old days” I would have started a biography of a Holocaust survivor by giving the students lots of background information and pre-teaching vocabulary. However, that doesn’t seem to be best practice under Common Core. I felt like a duck out of water for a while; I just didn’t know how to begin. I found a way through my problems in a book titled The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core by Harvey F. Silver, R. Thomas Dewing, and Mathew J Perini. This slim, 86-page volume published by ASCD is a research-based guide to six instructional strategies grounded in the Common Core. I decided to let this be my primary toolkit as I teach Surviving Hitler this year.

I started Surviving Hitler with a strategy described in The Core Six called “Inductive Learning.” Students worked in groups of 2 or 3 for about 30 minutes to categorize and label the following terms pulled from Ch.1 of Surviving Hitler:

 

Gdynia, Poland	full-time housekeeper	electricity
collected stamps	newsreels	beach
went to the movies	scapegoat	Nazi dictator
hot cereal with milk and butter	entertained friends and relatives	sweet fried pastry with pockets of jelly inside
hockey	Baltic Sea	bar mitzvah
big mahogany dining room table	antisemitic	stripped of their citizenship rights
bicycle races	laughter	silk dresses
latest styles from Paris	handmade waffle cones filled with delicious, rich cream	twelve miles from the German border
Yiddish	picnics	public school
spacious apartment	telephones	indoor plumbing

The students were told that they would need to explain the reasons why they grouped terms the way they did and why they chose the labels they did for the categories. Next, they were asked to write at least two predictions about Ch.1 based on the terms they sorted. For example: Do they think the terms came from fiction or non-fiction text? Specific genre? The topic of the text? Setting? Details about main character(s)? Conflict?

During the next class, reporters from each group shared their team’s category labels and predictions. I recorded the predictions for each class on chart paper. We talked about these as we went and made generalizations about them at the end of the group sharing time. The following table shows most of the predictions made by the five sections of language arts with which I did this activity:

·         Jewish people surviving the Holocaust ·         “common luxuries” ·         location near Germany ·         WW II ·         wealthy before war began ·         Ch.1 - before the war ·         historical fiction or non-fiction ·         Jews in hiding ·         in Poland ·         girl main character ·         boy main character

·         speak Yiddish ·         action happens in a concentration camp ·         main character having a bar mitzvah ·         Nazi dictator discriminates against Jewish characters ·         enjoys life before Holocaust ·         during 1930’s – 1940’s ·         family working at a pastry shop ·         near a beach in Germany ·         characters stripped of citizenship ·         pretended not to be Jewish to keep rights

  

Before we dismissed class the second day, I asked the students how they felt about the book we were about to read – were they curious and interested or not so much? Almost all of them said yes, they were curious – more so than if I had simply handed out the books. I did not tell them the title of the book at this point. At the end of the day, I hung the sheets of chart paper on the wall so that each class could see the predictions of the other classes.

When the students returned to class on the third day, I handed out the books. We took about ten minutes to survey the book – to look over the front and back covers, the title page and photo on the facing page, the table of contents, glance through the book at photos and captions, and read a paragraph or two to get a feel for the difficulty of the text and author’s writing style. As we conducted this survey, we talked a bit about the clues we were gathering about the text that supported or refuted our predictions – now posted for all to see. Then I gave directions for the next step of the “Inductive Learning” activity from The Core Six.  I asked students to create a three-column table with the headings shown below. I have filled in example evidence for one prediction that actually came from one of my classes.

Support – Evidence for ·         pg across from title pg – photo of Jack Mandelbaum, age 18 ·         quote from Jack’s son at front of book ·         p. 7 “…Jack recalled, remembering his childhood.”

Prediction non-fiction prediction added at this point - biography

Refute – Evidence against

  

After working through this example, I asked students to continue looking for evidence that supports or refutes predictions as they read the introduction and first chapter. 

This is all I have to report at this time; my students are still in the midst of this activity. However, my sense is that we are off to a good start. My students have started reading the biography as information-seekers and problem-solvers.

Because I did not start by teaching a whole lot of background information, I am expecting questions to arise as we read. That will give us the opportunity to practice a whole plethora of other Common Core skills. I wrote a framework for myself before I started – subject to revision as I go. I will attach it for your benefit and update it again later. I will also try to post again and let you know how the unit is progressing.

This is my 29^th year of teaching. I thought by this point I would have a few things down pat. Instead, I find that I feel like a “baby teacher” all over again. I have to admit that it adds stress. On the other hand, it keeps me learning and trying new things. I guess that is what being a lifelong learner is all about. I suppose if a teacher should be one thing most of all – he or she should be a learner.

 

CLICK HERE to continue reading and for Laura's lesson plan.

Teaching a Common Core Reading Standards through Holocaust Reading

Reading Standards for Literature Grades 9-10

Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in the work from outside the United States.

Text to use:  Flares of Memory:  Stories of Childhood during the Holocaust, Edited by Anita Brostoff with Sheila Chamovitz.

Passage:  An Unforgettable Passover Seder by Ernest Light

April 8^th, 1944: Passover.

The table was set with our special dishes, wine, herbs, and matzos.  Elijah’s cup, filled with wine, rested at the end of the table where I was.  Our family around the table consisted of my father, mother, sister, her two-year-old daughter, and my three brothers.

It was just about seven weeks since the Germans had occupied Hungary.  You could see on everyone’s face concern about the future.  But reading the prayers in the Hagadah, we temporarily forgot the present.

Suddenly our neighbor’s daughter burst into the house.  Almost hysterical, she screamed, “Hide me, hide me!  I just ran away from a German soldier.  He tried to grab me!”

Without thinking about the consequences, we pushed her into the next room, where she hid herself.  Everyone sat calmly and continued reading the Hagadah.  My father led the prayer.

Following Passover tradition, we had not locked the doors, so that the Prophet Elijah could come in and join us at the Seder.  This is how it was that a German soldier could just walk in, a gun over his shoulder.

Since I sat at the end of the table, he stood closest to me.  I could feel his breathing behind my back.  We continued to read as if we didn’t notice him.  He stood there for a while – I don’t know whether it was two minutes or ten minutes.  Then he turned around and left.

For the last fifty years, I’ve been wondering what made that soldier leave without inquiring about the girl, or threatening that we had to tell him where she was.  I’ve come up with several possibilities:

-          He thought that people who were hiding someone could not sit so calmly, conducting services.

-          The German military command warned the soldiers not to commit any unnecessary violence, not to alarm the local population.

-          He just might have been a human being.

. . .

I’ll never know the truth.

Questions to discuss with your students:

1. What event is being described in this passage?  What are the clues (words) that showed you what event is being described? 
2. Whose point of view is being presented in this passage?  How can you tell? 
3. What do you think is the purpose of this passage? 
4.  What emotions are displayed in this writing? 
5.  What is the central theme of this passage? 
6.  What questions do you still have after reading this passage?

Things to keep in mind for your lesson:

There are many short readings that you can use in your classroom to help address the Common Core Reading Standards.  This particular reading could be used as a part of a larger Holocaust unit or could be used in isolation.  You might consider changing the discussion questions depending on how you plan to use the article.  Putting students into small groups to discuss the questions in advance could give the class a richer discussion.

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.