Teaching about the Holocaust

Resources for Teaching About the Holocaust.

This year marks the 72^nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass. On November 9,1936 over 200 synagogues were burned,  hundreds of Jewish owned businesses were destroyed and thousands  of German and Austrian Jews were rounded up and arrested by Adolf Hitler’s NAZI regime. This brutal event marks a turning point of what has become known an as the Holocaust..

 There are a vast number of excellent books on the topic available for high school and college students as well as teachers desiring background material. Teachers need to be mindful of the appropriateness of both written and  video materials.

The World Must Know ( c.2005) and Witness to the Holocaust (c.1997  by Dr.Michael Berenbaum are two outstanding volumes  by one of America’s pre-eminent Holocaust scholars. Dr. Berenbaum is also the author of A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors (Bulfinch, 2003). For those who wish to address the issue of Holocaust deniers, a number of works by Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, professor at Emory University are outstanding. The best known is probably Denying the Holocaust (c.1994) for which she ended up as the plaintiff in a much publicized civil lawsuit in Great Britain.

 The Diary of Ann Frank  is a classic and a must read and works well in an interdisciplinary unit with social studies and literature classes particularly in  middle and high school. A film version is also available. An excellent first person account of a Holocaust survivor is  The Miracle of Survival: Angels at my Back by Janet Moskowitz. (c.2007)

 I have found “Paperclips,” to be a powerful DVD also suitable for middle and high school students, This project started by the students  of Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee chronicles the “perfect storm” of student, faculty, parent and community involvement that both promotes tolerance and respect in our multicultural society as well as telling the horrific stories of the Holocaust.

For more information and lesson ideas, I recommend that you visit the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at www.ushmm.org and click on the link for teachers.You may also contact me at educatorpartners@gmail.com.  Thanks for reading my post. I hope to hear from you soon.