To Honor the Survivors
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Sample Holocaust Education Activity Ideas for Middle,
High School, College and Graduate Students and Teachers
Esther Finder January 2012
This is designed as a supplement for Holocaust educators. There are established curricula available on the internet (see resources listed below) but here are some concrete examples of classroom activities that are fairly easy and effective.
The key to successful Holocaust education programs is to make them relevant so the history will resonate with the students. It is also important to be adaptable. Some concepts work in one community and not in another. On this site we will share ideas from around the US and keep adding more as we learn about innovative projects and programs. Please check periodically to see new postings.
The window of opportunity is closing and the time when students can meet with Holocaust survivors is NOW. This is important for the following reasons.
- In order to make this history come alive to the students it would be beneficial to have survivors tell their first person narratives.
- The time will come when children and grandchildren of survivors, and the students who now meet survivors, will have to speak and tell this history.
- These students will be the last to personally meet survivors so they should be nurtured as future “secondary” witnesses.
There are some themes that are relevant throughout the academic years. For example:
- How does what happened in Nazi Germany relate to the problems we have today with hate crimes (and even bullying) in our schools?
- What can we learn from WWII that will help us understand our tendencies to obey and conform?
- What propaganda techniques, pioneered by the Nazis, still work on us today?
- Why do so many politicians trot out the Nazis to vilify their political opponents?
For more, see below.
Local contacts:
Esther Finder, President, Generations of the Shoah – Nevada etfinder@juno.com
Ray Fiol, President, Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada RFiol@aol.com
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Contents
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Available Resources
A variety of resources are available online.
A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust: http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/default.htm
This site includes a timeline, bibliographies, maps, activities, movies & resources.
This is the Curriculum page from the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education website: http://www.state.nj.us/education/holocaust/curriculum/ . This site has curricula guides for K-12 and a resource list of helpful websites.
The Council of Holocaust Educators in New Jersey also has online lesson plans: http://www.che-nj.org/resources.html
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC www.ushmm.org has a tremendous amount of information freely available. For example, their ID cards lend themselves to various classroom activities (see sample activities below)
The Holocaust Teacher Resource Center has lesson plans and curricula http://www.holocaust-trc.org/lesson.htm
The USC Shoah Foundation Institute (formerly known as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation) is starting a pilot program to make the videotaped interviews they recorded available to teachers and students. The site includes guidelines on ethical editing of the available videos. That is not yet available to educators. When it becomes available it will be noted here. They have information on their site: http://sfi.usc.edu/ (This is in addition to their Echoes and Reflections materials which include survivor testimonies and supplemental educational resources.)
The Wiesenthal Center (Museum of Tolerance) has a list of 36 questions and answers that deal with some basic Holocaust history. This is a tremendous resource for teachers: http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663. See also http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394687
The State of Florida has resources, including program ideas, online: http://www.educationfund.org/programs/impactii/holocausteducation/
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Israel, has sample lesson plans ready for classroom use starting with students age 9 and up: http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/educational_materials/index.asp
There is also a list of helpful websites available through Generations of the Shoah International (GSI): http://www.genshoah.org/related_sites.html
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The standards related to Holocaust Education established by
Clark County Public Schools
WORLD HISTORY - GRADE 10
7.6: Student will synthesize the causes and consequences of the Holocaust including the impact on the targeted groups.
9.8: Students will determine the causes and consequences of genocidal conflicts, e.g. the Holocaust, Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, and analyze the moral implications of these conflicts around the world.
US HISTORY - GRADE 11
4.9: Students will describe the causes and consequences of the Holocaust.
4.10: Students will describe the daily life of a victim of the Holocaust.
4.11: Students will assess the scale of the Holocaust and its impact on the targeted groups.
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Here are some specific examples of activities for different age groups.
For middle school
Adopt a Survivor
- Students spend time with a survivor in person (or research a survivor) and get to know the survivor’s story very well.
- The student promises to tell the survivor’s story in future years.
- The student might bring a parent to these meetings to help flesh out the survivor’s history beyond the current age of the student.
Ex. Parent would know to ask about things beyond student’s experience.
This has the benefit of reaching two generations of learners.
To see some prototypes of this program:
http://www.ujcnj.org/page.aspx?id=158842
http://www.state.nj.us/education/holocaust/survivor/
http://www.state.nj.us/education/holocaust/curriculum/TeachingAboutTheHolocaustCurriculum.pdf
To contact the local survivors group in Las Vegas, Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada, please contact RFiol@aol.com. The survivors group can connect teachers with members of their group who are willing to work with the schools.
For additional assistance, contact Esther Finder, President of Generations of the Shoah – Nevada at etfinder@juno.com.
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Class Collage
- A collage with photos of people who lived during the Holocaust with each student researching a person whose photo is part of the collage.
- A summary of each person’s story could be part of a class book or art presentation.
- Research could be conducted using the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) ID cards http://resources.ushmm.org/inquery/uia_query.php?noframes=x&page_len=25&max_docs=all&db_group=ushmm&db_name=photos&db_name=wlc&d b_name=fvarchive&query_append=type%28idcard%29&query=Search, as well as researching local survivors, and would include the historical context for each survivor’s experience.
To start:
- Teachers can select the people to be showcased in the collage (from the local survivors or the USHMM website) or the students can go to the USHMM website and select a person they would like to research.
- The ID cards have photos and brief summaries of the people who lived during that time: some survived and some were killed.
Regardless of the source, the project goes to the next stage.
- After the student has selected their person, research can be done on the USHMM website to get some background on the country and the historic events in that country during the Holocaust. For example, Hungarians, Poles and Germans had very different experiences during the war.
- Research should include information on any site, including concentration camps, which were mentioned in the ID card or by the survivor.
To contact the local survivors group in Las Vegas, Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada, please contact RFiol@aol.com. The survivors group can connect teachers with members of their group who are willing to work with the schools. To reach descendants of survivors contact Generations of the Shoah - Nevada etfinder@juno.com.
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Create questions for students to interview a survivor
or a member of a survivor’s family
Students can create their own interview by
- Compiling questions they would like answered by a survivor.
- Giving those questions to a survivor (or descendant if a survivor is not available) and those questions could be incorporated into the presentation.
Students should consider the following when crafting their questions:
What was the person’s life before, during and after the Holocaust?
Here are some sample questions for each category. The students will generate questions reflective of their level of maturity and understanding and will need guidance. There is no need for an emphasis on violence and suffering. Survivors and any descendants we recommend will be sensitized to speak to the students at their grade level. Most of the survivors still with us were fairly young before the war so the students should be able to relate to them at that level.
Pre-War
- When / where was the survivor born?
- What did their families do for a living?
- What was the city, town or village like?
- What did the survivor do for fun when s/he was a child?
- What chores did they have to do?
- What was their favorite / least favorite subject in school?
- What did s/he think s/he would do when they grew up?
- What did the survivor know about the Nazis before the war?
- How did you know the war started and what were the first changes it brought to your life?
During the War (in ghettos and concentration camps)
- How did you get to the ghetto / camp?
- What were the living conditions like?
- Please tell me about a typical day…
- What did you know about what was happening outside the ghetto/camp?
In Hiding (above ground)
- Who helped you and how?
- If you had to use another name, what name did you use?
- How did you get false papers?
- What was the hardest part about hiding?
In Hiding (below ground, in attics, etc)
- Who helped you and how?
- How did you get food in and waste out?
- Did you have any light or heat?
- What did you do during the days / nights?
- How much did you know about what was going on outside?
Post War
- When did you realize the war was over? How?
- Which army liberated your area? How did they treat you?
- What were some of the first things you did when you were finally free?
- Who from your family and friends was left alive?
- What made you come to the US and how did you get here?
- How did you learn English?
- What were some of the hardest things about adjusting to life here?
- What is the best part of living in the US?
Have the students conduct post-Holocaust interviews with local survivors.
- What have they been able to accomplish in the US?
- What contributions have they made to our community?
For more information / assistance in this please contact Esther Finder etfinder@juno.com.
To request a Holocaust survivor to speak in a classroom, contact Ray at the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada: RFiol@aol.com.
To request a child or grandchild of survivors, contact Esther at Generations of the Shoah – Nevada: etfinder@juno.com.
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“Jigsaw” classroom
It is difficult to cover material in a classroom setting with limited instructional time so the jigsaw classroom technique might be useful in these capacities:
Reading assignment:
Example: 4 Holocaust books are assigned to a class but have the class divided into groups of 4. Each of the 4 students reads a different book and tells the other members of the jigsaw group what the book is about. The group then writes up a report together for a grade. There are any number of books that are recommended for students in middle and high school.
History project:
Students are broken into groups and assigned different aspects of the Holocaust experience such as:
- Different victims targeted by the Nazis (Jews, Roma / Gypsies, Communists, clergy, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.)
- Impact of Nazi control over different institutions: schools, press, courts, police, etc. What roles did each of these play?
- Explore the difference between victim, bystander, perpetrator and “upstander” (the person who steps up to do the morally correct thing)
- Assign different countries to different groups of students to compare how the Holocaust was executed in different places. A culminating activity might be the creation of a map highlighting the differences.
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Bullying and Ostracism
There is a problem with bullying and the ostracizing of “the other” in our schools all over the US. This program is from New Jersey: Teaching for Safe and Inclusive Classrooms: Examining Bullying and Ostracism in Schools
http://www2.facinghistory.org/campus/events.nsf/HTMLProfessionalDevelopment/2103155BEBCE120B85257909006BA991?Opendocument&utm_content=0000-00-00%2000%3A00%3A00&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=RSVP%20Today%21&utm_campaign=Join%20Us%21%20Teaching%20for%20Safe%20and%20Inclusive%20Classrooms
Explore some of the reasons behind prejudice and discrimination, obedience and conformity. For example:
- The film of Jane Elliot’s brown eye / blue eye experiment to talk about discrimination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqp6GnYqIjQ&feature=topics
- To understand how easy it is to get a person to obey, show this video of the experiment of Dr. Stanley Milgram on obedience to authority: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9l_puxcrlM&feature=related
- The reality of discrimination described by Holocaust survivor Irv Roth http://www.thememoriallibrary.org/videos/survivor-videos/?vid=0&page=1&ver=short
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For high school students
(Adopt a survivor. See above.)
Create a memory book of the survivors of a particular town, or of the lost relatives of the Las Vegas survivors.
Creating a memory book for a town:
- Select a town in the country designated. There is a wealth of information about the larger cities, like Warsaw, Cracow and Lodz in Poland. A smaller town is harder to research.
- Decide on a theme: all Jewish inhabitants; children or whatever.
- Check the Yad Vashem photo archive for available photos from that town: http://collections.yadvashem.org/photosarchive/en-us/photos.html
- Check the Jewish Gen Yizkor Book Project for translations of memory books from the destroyed European Jewish communities: http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/translations.html
- Research the historical context and create a timeline of events including the creation of a ghetto (if relevant), deportation to ghetto / camps or extermination.
Creating a remembrance book for the lost families of the survivors in a local community:
- Establish a list of all the home communities of the survivors in your area.
- Check the Yad Vashem and JewishGen websites as indicated above.
- Research the historical context and establish a timeline as indicated above.
- The book can be organized according to alphabetical, geographical or chronological order
- Different classrooms can work on individual survivors and the school can create a book.
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Create a Holocaust Commemoration / Remembrance Program for the classroom or
school and have an in-house field trip for the students.
A commemoration could include survivors and/ or their children and grandchildren, videos, abbreviated stories of those who experienced the Shoah, photos or a multimedia combination of several of these.
The example of the Holocaust Commemoration at UNLV in 2011
(Based on the programs done at Montgomery College in Maryland)
- Review the ID card database on the US Holocaust Museum’s website
- gather some that have photos that could be projected on a screen (some photos are too blurry)
- consider the various histories and try to assemble a broad range of Holocaust experiences
- Jewish survivors and victims
- Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Partisans and resistance fighters
- Political prisoners
- the different countries occupied by the Nazis
- Prepare the photos to be projected on to a screen during the program
- Condense the stories into about one minute long summaries, either in the 3rd person or 1st person format, for the students to read in the program.
- Assign students to read a summary; boys read a boy’s history, etc. Make sure the student practices the name of the person and the town. Some of these names are hard to pronounce. Practice the whole program.
- Choreograph the program
- Boys and girls alternate
- Ensure they are organized in concert with the photos to be projected.
- Keep the presentation as geographically diverse as possible so if you
- Have several people in Poland they do not get clustered together.
- Make sure the students are lined up and ready to start their reading on time and not waste time waiting for kids to walk to the podium, etc.
For more information about this contact Esther Finder: etfinder@juno.com.
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Create a collection of the stories of the survivors who settled in Nevada and their
contributions to our community.
This could be in book or virtual book form**
- Contact the leader of the local Holocaust survivors group and explain what the project is and ask who might be willing to participate.
- Photograph the survivor (if possible) or collect a recent photo.
- Try to get a pre-war or post-war photo of the survivor
- Interview the survivor and get a brief summary of their Holocaust experience and their post-war life in the US. Some of them may have lived in different cities during the many years since the Holocaust and that should not matter.
- Condense the interviews and select the photos to be used. Note: maps and historical photos can also be used.
- Each survivor can be a page in the book. Also, this project can be turned into an exhibit that can travel from classroom to classroom, school to school or public library to library.
**Note: perhaps one way to generate interest is to invite all the high schools, public and private; in Las Vegas and Reno, to jointly create a book about the eyewitnesses to history in their community. This could involve survivors and liberators.
Following up on this concept:
- The next year they may be invited to work on a book dealing with the contributions that survivors made when they rebuilt their lives in the US.
- In the future they could work on contributions of the children and then the grandchildren of survivors.
- This prototype could then be extended to other groups like survivors from other repressive political regimes or different ethnic groups.
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Create a Family Tree
for a survivor and compare it to the students’ family tree.
To make the point that the Holocaust happened to real people, to families and communities, it would be helpful to relate the experiences of the survivors to those of the students. One technique to do that is to create family trees for comparison.
- Students can be assigned to do a family tree and research their own family history. They should come up with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
- Contact the survivors or descendants group in your community and have someone come into the classroom and talk about their family history
- Towards the end of the visit have the students work on the survivor’s family tree including who survived and who did not.
- Students are asked to reflect on the differences between their family tree and the survivor’s tree to get a sense of how much was lost and how personal those losses were. Some kind of written assignment should accompany this project.
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Teaching Trunks
Create an artifact trunk for a real survivor or a character from either history or Holocaust literature. Real artifacts are hard to come by and teaching trunks can be expensive to buy or rent so create your own. There are several ways to do this.
Seed it with basic information and let students explore and create a history of this person
- Photograph of a person who (might have) lived during the Holocaust
- Map with a town highlighter
- An article of clothing that might have been worn at that time
- A pair of glasses / a toothbrush (a style that might have been worn then)
- A diary or letter
OR give the students a person’s name and have them create a life and find “artifacts” important in that person’s life.
OR let the students be creative
- Tell the students they are going away and are allowed one suitcase.
- Emphasize they won’t know where they are going or for how long so they must pack wisely.
- Stipulate one standard suitcase, no wheels.
- Have the students pack at home and make a list of items packed.
- Based on what they pack for themselves, have them create a trunk for someone who lived during the Holocaust.
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Invite a liberator to talk about his wartime experiences
and what he witnessed.
Sample questions to ask the liberator / witness:
- What experience with Jews did you have before World War II?
- How much did you know about the concentration camps during the war?
- When did you first realize what was happening to the Jews in Europe?
- How did you find out?
- What did you see with your own eyes?
- What did you do to document the experience?
- What did you tell your family and friends about what you saw?
- How did this experience change your life?
- What would you like students to learn from your experience?
Note: remember not to answer a yes / no question unless you have to establish a fact before you can ask a follow-up question.
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Create Opportunities for Interpersonal or Prolonged Contact
Between Survivors and Students outside the Classroom
- Offer volunteer opportunities for college-bound students so they can add these unique experiences to their college applications. Competitive colleges look for these unusual and enriching activities.
- Work with survivors (in conjunction with the Holocaust Survivors Group of Southern Nevada or the Jewish Family Service Agency). Contact Nora at Jewish Family Service Agency: Norak@jfsalv.org, Ray at the Holocaust Survivors Group: RFiol@aol.com, or Esther at Generations of the Shoah – Nevada etfinder@juno.com.
- Have students review films and documentaries on the Holocaust and identify scenes that would lend themselves to classroom use. (This might be a group project for a class grade?)
- Have students review Holocaust curricula created around the world and evaluate what components of those curricula would be a good supplement to what is currently being done locally.
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For college and graduate students
1. Adopt a survivor (see above)
2. Create a virtual book or documentary of the survivors in Nevada, or their legacy. For an example of a virtual book: http://www.adaughterslegacy.com/
3. Create an exhibit, like the Portraits of Life done at Montgomery College in Maryland. Students can take the photos, research and condense the survivor testimony, create panels for display and a pamphlet to accompany the exhibit. http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/portraitsoflife/photography%20catalog.pdf
4. Offer interdisciplinary programs that include political science, sociology and psychology. (Note: these concepts may be used as themes for discussions for students in middle and high schools.)
Political science, law, journalism students might consider:
- What happens in a society where a few individuals have absolute power?
- What happens when there are no checks & balances in a democracy?
- (Germany had been a democracy when Hitler came to power.)
- What happens when there is no freedom of the press or freedom of speech?
- What precedents were set with the Nuremberg Trials?
- What can be learned from the re-institution of war crimes prosecutions that were recently announced by the German government?
- What are the personal / political agendas of those who try to deny or re-write Holocaust history?
Science, pre-med, philosophy and ethics students might consider:
- What happens when pseudo-scientific ideas are presented as scientific fact for political or economic purposes?
- What does one do with the medical research that was done in places like Auschwitz?
- What impacts did those experiments have on our medical ethics today?
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Social Sciences
- How does the individual person behave when the society behaves immorally?
- What happens when prejudice becomes institutionalized discrimination?
- What made Nazi propaganda so successful?
- What are crimes against humanity?
- What is scapegoating? Is this relevant to bullying in schools? Does it lead to hate crimes?
- Why do so many disaffected young people, ranging from the early storm troopers to the Columbine school shooters, look to the Nazi for inspiration?
- What is individual responsibility?
- What is the bystander effect?
- How much power do situational forces have over the individual?
- In what ways did the Holocaust experience differ for men and women?
Education
- How does teaching about the Holocaust make students more respectful of classmates and teachers?
- How might Holocaust education demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of life in the real world?
- How might the study of this genocide help our students reduce hatred and prejudice?
- Why do the Nazis appeal to disaffected young people?
- How can this history help students establish a moral compass?
It should be noted that when Holocaust education is taught in the schools it does more than just improve the students’ critical thinking skills; it also leads to better behavior towards each other and towards their teachers.
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Looking to the future
- Not every community has access to survivor speakers and those survivors who are still making public appearances cannot speak in every classroom. It is therefore necessary to look to recorded testimony.
- The Echoes and Reflections educations materials provide video clips of survivors with supplemental materials for the teachers to use.
- A possible project might be for students to work with a survivor, learn that survivor’s story and then create their own supplemental materials to provide background for that story. This could work at the high school and college level.
- The USC Shoah Foundation Institute should soon go public with their online resource. Students can be assigned to research specific areas of interest from hidden children to resistance to espionage. The teachers can certainly tap into this free resource.
- Have the students research the survivors and / or children of survivors who are making a difference in our society today.
- Survivors might include Elie Wiesel, Gerda Klein, Simon Wiesenthal, Thomas Burgenthal, Tom Lantos, Marcel Marceau and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
- Children of survivors you may recognize include Wolf Blitzer, Martin Fletcher, Henry Winkler, and others.
- How did the Holocaust / refugee experience influence their choices?
- What might other refugees learn from them?
- Do some programming bringing Holocaust survivors and survivors of other genocides together to the students can see that things are still happening to people today… “on our watch”. A visit of such a meeting between the survivors should be filmed for future use.
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To encourage community involvement
A whole generation of Americans was raised with no knowledge of the Holocaust. That generation is now the parent cohort of today’s students. We should try to reach this population since there was no Holocaust education when they were in school. We can and should bring the parents into this learning process. Holocaust education has proven to be helpful in improving the quality of relationships between students and between students and teachers. It may also have benefits that extend to the family.
Essay and art contests have been used successfully but if you really want to involve the education community, it might be better to have the contest between schools, not individuals. That would involve the principals as well as faculty and students. It would be great to involve parents, too.