‘This is a human story’: Educators learn strategies to teach the Holocaust

Jennifer Chambers | The Detroit News (TNS)

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. — Because the Holocaust is difficult material to teach, Renea Di Bella, an education specialist at the Zekelman Holocaust Museum, advises teachers to start by asking students a question.

“What do you already know about the Holocaust?”

“That serves two functions: You know what to teach and what not to teach,” Di Bella said of the advice she gives Holocaust studies teachers in Michigan. “You also give the students the ability to give their own background knowledge. When you ask the student, it primes them to dive into learning new stuff to add onto their own knowledge.”

For three days inside a conference room at the Farmington Hills museum, Di Bella and other trainers led about 165 Michigan educators during the museum’s Summer Academy, a one-of-a-kind professional development session designed to enhance teachers’ Holocaust curriculum, teach new methods for better engaging students on the Holocaust and asking students to think critically about how the Holocaust influences today’s social issues.

The Holocaust was the systematic effort by Nazi Germany and its allies from 1933 to 1945 to persecute and murder 6 million Jews, or about two-thirds of all European Jews, in death camps using different methods, including gas chambers.

More than 23,000 students and their teachers toured the Farmington Hills museum exhibit this past school year as part of their Holocaust studies. Since 2016, Michigan has required a social studies curriculum for grades 8 to 12 to include instruction about genocide including the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. The statute recommends a combined total of six hours of such instruction.

The Summer Academy gives teachers, who range from social studies or history educators to art/music instructors, access to new resources, a chance to connect with experts and tools on how to bring history to life for students, museum officials said. Sessions and full-day workshops cover 11 topics, including trauma-informed practices of teaching the Holocaust; “Eugenics and the Holocaust: The Biology of Hatred, Complicity and Action during the Holocaust”; and another called “Spotlight on Contemporary Antisemitism.”

Jason Windes, a middle school teacher in the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, attended the summer academy so he could learn more about the Holocaust and assist other teachers in his district who are also teaching it. It’s primarily taught in his district through English/Language Arts courses and the 2003 young adult novel “Milkweed,” a story about a boy experiencing the Holocaust in Warsaw, Poland.

“I’m trying to facilitate where the teachers might not feel comfortable or the book doesn’t address everything. I’m trying to help the kids understand the reality,” Windes said. “I’m here to learn to broaden my knowledge of the Holocaust and its so many different details as well as connecting it with this information on how to make our lessons better.”

Amid the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and a rise in antisemitic incidents locally and nationally during the past two years, the lessons of the Holocaust are more important now than ever, educators agreed. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League said it has recorded a surge of antisemitic incidents on college and university campuses nationwide since the start of the war. The ADL reported that 73% of Jewish college students surveyed have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the beginning of the 2023-24 school year alone.

Educators trained at the Farmington Hills museum have more than just textbooks to guide them, including video testimonies from survivors and exhibits and archives at the newly renovated museum. Each year, thousands of visitors learn the history of the Holocaust there and how to apply those lessons today via its 55,000-square-foot collection and library archive.

How Holocaust education has changed

Sara Pohl, a teacher at Portland High School in mid-Michigan whose courses include world history, American history, genocide and the Holocaust, came to the summer academy for the second year in a row because she said it helps her be a better teacher in all of her classes.

“It’s about allowing the kids to come in and explore this and not be afraid. … A lot of people are scared because it is very heavy topic,” Pohl said. “We don’t have to go in depth, but start to understand this is a human story and we all need to understand it.”

One of the bigger changes over the last 20 years of teaching about the Holocaust is so few students now know a person who was alive during World War II, Pohl said.

“The distance is growing so far that it’s hard for them to understand what is going on. They didn’t grow up with the stories like I did,” Pohl said. “Any way we can connect the kids with a better understanding of all this, I’m looking forward to taking it back to my classroom.”

The summer academy is an opportunity for teachers before the school year starts to investigate issues of Holocaust, both in content and education strategy and resources, said Ruth Bergman, director of education at the museum.

A new approach this year was organizing the summer academy around themes: the human story, ideology and resistance.

“That means we want people to remember the Holocaust was perpetrated by people, not monsters, not some distance force we can disassociate from,” Bergman said. “It’s the people who were the victims. They had a robust life before the Holocaust and they were not nameless, faceless victims.”

While students have questions, such as why didn’t victims resist more, she said, the museum’s mission is to educate everyone about the Holocaust through the study of the dangers of hate and apathy.

“We really wanted to make sure we are not telling a perpetrator-centered story, that our visitors can hear from survivors, how it impacted them, what they did, what choices they did or didn’t have,” Bergman said of the museum’s exhibit. “The Holocaust wasn’t a tsunami. It happened because people let it happen or made it happen.”

Providing a ‘very powerful’ lesson

Bergman said one of the museum’s keys to success with school groups is working hard with teachers ahead of the student visit to help teachers integrate the museum experience into the classroom.

“And so it’s not a one-off,” Bergman said. “Our museum will get ahold of the teachers before the visit and ask them, what do they know? Are they studying through world history or U.S. history and ask the teachers what the goals are for the visit.”

After they go through the core exhibit, students can hear from a next-generation speaker, a child or grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. They hear the survivors’ story and the lasting impact on families, Bergman said.

At the end of the exhibit, visitors are asked to fill out a card with another question: What I can do? Answers are posted on a wall at the museum on white note cards. Bergman said it’s another opportunity to carry the lessons of the Holocaust forward into the real world.

“It’s very powerful,” she said.

Christina Nielson, a teacher at Everest Academy, a preschool through 12th grade Catholic school in Clarkston, brought her eighth graders to the museum for a tour and attended the summer academy this month at the museum.

“This is a topic that can be difficult to teach without proper resources and knowledge, so I was hoping to gain those. Between this year and last year, I’m more confident in teaching it,” Nielson said.

The Catholic school teacher liked the focus at the summer academy on the human story.

“I guide discussions more toward the human aspect of these people and what they went through and help my students relate to those people,” Nielson said.

“I do think that they leave my classroom with more empathy for what these survivors have gone through. Testimonies from survivors really help to bring empathy back to these situations and really help make those connections.”

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