Shoah is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. Next week religious and secular communities around the world will be commemorating this horrific event with services, guest speakers and memorial programs. Whether you teach in a state that has a mandated Holocaust curriculum or not, this event creates a timely opportunity to teach you student about the effects of indifference and hatred. Here are several suggestions for teachers who wish to prepare lessons about the Holocaust.
The Holocaust by Bullets
Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest on as mission. He is seeking to investigate a part of the Holocaust that has barely been mentioned. While most writings, films and television programs focused on the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, and Treblinka, little has been mentioned of the Einsatzgroupen, mobile killing squads, run by the SS that drove into small towns and villages, primarily in the Ukraine, rounded up all of the Jews in the community and shot them. Many local citizens were complicit in this atrocity, pointing out where the Jews lived, digging the pits where the mass executions took place, and taking some of the victims’ valuables.
In an effort to locate these mass graves and give the dead a proper Jewish burial, Desbois went to the Ukraine, started knocking on doors and asking two simple questions- Did you live here during the war and do you know what happened to the Jews. Despite having numerous doors being slammed in his face and despite being threatened, Desbois persisted in gathering information as well as artifacts to determine what happened to approximately 1.5 million Jews in the Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe.
The Holocaust by Bullets is a searing account of one of the most egregious crime committed during the war. Desbois pulls no punches to vividly describe what he saw and to relate his interviews with eyewitnesses. While this book is most suitable for upper high school and college students, it is a must read for teachers of the Holocaust want to get a more complete picture of the systematic efforts of the Nazi regime to bring the “ Final Solution” of what to do with European Jewry to reality.
The book, initially published in 2008 is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. It is published by Palgrave Macmillin with support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It can be ordered at this web site from Amazon.com or at your local bookstore.
Teachers and administrators who are looking for a more dynamic way to get students to understand the Holocaust, I would like to recommend “ Warsaw.” “Warsaw” is a musical production in the Les Miserables genre that focuses on the lives of those who were caught in the Warsaw ghetto, its defiant resistance and its ultimate demise. This show with a riveting plot and passionate musical score is available for schools, colleges, churches and synagogues as well as other public venues. For more information about the production and to hear some samples of the music go to www.warsawthemusical.com
The United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum has a great deal of information about the events of the Holocaust and the Days of Remembrance, April 18-22. You can access this information by going to http://www.ushmm.org/
“Those who fail to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”
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