The Anguish of Liberation and Return to Life
Note to educators:
This article is an abbreviated draft of two newer comprehensive classroom activities. The lesson plan "Liberation and Survival" and the ceremony "Remembering Liberation" (both accessible from the right column sidebar) use some of the same testimony written below, and both have more detail and more focused approaches to the subject. This article can serve as an introduction or overview to the main theme of liberation and the return to life. Other relevant resources appear in the right column sidebar.IntroductionThe year 2005 marks the sixtieth anniversary...
Continue reading...This article is an abbreviated draft of two newer comprehensive classroom activities. The lesson plan "Liberation and Survival" and the ceremony "Remembering Liberation" (both accessible from the right column sidebar) use some of the same testimony written below, and both have more detail and more focused approaches to the subject. This article can serve as an introduction or overview to the main theme of liberation and the return to life. Other relevant resources appear in the right column sidebar.IntroductionThe year 2005 marks the sixtieth anniversary...
Teaching the Holocaust through Literature
“The historical, by its nature, tends to accent the unfolding of events while indicating social and political trends. Art, on the other hand, has always sought out the individual, his inner [world], and from that, it tries to understand the [outside] world. Art, perhaps only art, is the last defense against the banal, the commonplace and the irrelevant, and, to take it even further, the last defense against simplicity.”Aharon Appelfeld, Speech on the eve of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, 1997, Yad VashemIn the field of Holocaust education, teachers face...
Continue reading...The Value of Holocaust Poetry in Education
IntroductionThis article will explore how poetry can be used by educators to teach and commemorate the Holocaust. The famous German sociologist, Theodor Adorno, who fled the Nazi regime for England in 1934, proclaimed shortly after the war that writing poetry after Auschwitz seemed barbaric. In his view, words in any artistic configuration were doomed to distort the harsh experiences of victims and survivors, constituting some kind of disfigurement of truth. He later modified his initial position with the passing of time. Adorno’s vision expressed his fear for the trivialization of the Holocaust....
Continue reading...The Human Spirit in the Shadow of Death
Prof. Havi DreifussDuring WWII, European Jewry was faced with a constant fight for its very survival. At a time when murder became the norm, and power endorsed unprecedented atrocities, many were swept away, unable to endure the perpetual struggle or adhere to the moral code of human society. Yet even under such dire conditions there were those who risked their lives — deliberately and intentionally — for higher values, including educating children, maintaining religious values and traditions, and sustaining centuries-old cultural activities. An examination of the humane responses in the face of the Holocaust,...
Continue reading...Teaching about the Righteous Among the Nations in the Classroom
Non-Jewish Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust
IntroductionThis article will examine how the courageous actions of the Righteous Among the Nations can be highlighted when teaching and commemorating the Holocaust.By introducing examples of some of the Righteous Among the Nations, the teacher can introduce historical content, and religious and moral values, while personalizing events of the Holocaust. This important historical lesson can be taught through various disciplines such as history, religion, civics, and literature.In Holocaust-related research and literature, the word "Righteous" is the term used for those who saved Jewish...
Continue reading...One Individual Can Make a Difference
Contemporary Lessons of the Holocaust
This e-newsletter features new lesson plans on two themes that at first glance may seem unconnected. One lesson plan focuses on the Japanese diplomat Sempo (Chiune) Sugihara. During the Second World War, he helped more than a thousand Jews, receiving the recognition of Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations. A professional diplomat of Japan operating out of distant Lithuania, he displayed precisely the qualities that we would like to instill in the young people of today’s world – a humane involvement in saving people, using the means at his disposal to ameliorate the fates...
Continue reading...On Witnesses and Testimonies
Perhaps never before in the annals of history has such a man-made human tragedy as the Holocaust created such devastation and misery for so many people. It is difficult, therefore, to comprehend how concerted efforts have been made to deny and annul this watershed event in western civilization. Even as the Nazis themselves were attempting to hide from the eyes of the world what they were perpetrating on the Jewish population of Europe and other civilian populations, victims and survivors were already recording their anguished cries during the war.These cries issued forth in real time from a deluge...
Continue reading...The Auschwitz Trials
Historical Focus
Dr. Naama ShikOverall, the vast majority of SS and various other personnel who had served at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex were never brought to justice. Only sixty-three of the approximately 7,000 SS personnel who served at Auschwitz, including Birkenau, Buna-Monowitz, and satellite camps were tried after the war. The first Auschwitz trial took place in Cracow, Poland, in November and December of 1947. Forty-one SS personnel were tried by the Polish authorities. The second trial of twenty-two SS officers took place in Frankfurt, Germany, between December, 1963 and August, 1965.
Continue reading...Why Study the Issue of Women during the Holocaust?
Central Trends in Gender-Oriented Historiography of the Holocaust
Dr. Naama ShikIn her autobiography, Ruth Bondy, survivor of Aushwitz-Birkenau, wrote: “In one of the meetings with high school students on Kibbutz Dafna, four of us survivors sat around a table and asked the students what it was about the Holocaust that was most difficult for them to endure. Three male students simultaneously said, ‘the hunger.’ And I said, ‘the filth.’”As a child, psychologist Shlomo Breznitz was hidden in a monastery with his sister Judith, as his parents were sent to Auschwitz. At the conclusion of his autobiography, he writes, “When my mother...
Continue reading...The German-Jewish Artist Charlotte Salomon
“Life Or Theatre?”
Orit Margaliot”And with dream-awakened eyes, she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”
–From “Life? Or Theatre?”, Charlotte Salomon, 1940-42Charlotte Salomon was born in 1917, to Albert Salomon, a surgeon, and Francisca Grunwald. The Salomon’s were a liberal family that defined themselves as “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.” In 1939, after Kristallnacht, Charlotte was forced to leave her home...
Continue reading...–From “Life? Or Theatre?”, Charlotte Salomon, 1940-42Charlotte Salomon was born in 1917, to Albert Salomon, a surgeon, and Francisca Grunwald. The Salomon’s were a liberal family that defined themselves as “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.” In 1939, after Kristallnacht, Charlotte was forced to leave her home...
"What We Value" - Spiritual Resistance During the Holocaust
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionThis article will introduce the concept of spiritual resistance during the Holocaust and present ways in which the lessons learned from such unarmed resistance can be taught in the classroom.By introducing students to examples of spiritual resistance, the teacher can facilitate discussions on how people survived during the Holocaust, and the personal values that contributed to their fight for survival.In Holocaust terminology, “spiritual resistance” refers to attempts by individuals to maintain their humanity and core values in spite of Nazi dehumanization and degradation....
Continue reading...The Continuation and Renewed Role of the Jewish Wife and Mother
Wartime Warsaw as a Test Case
Rinat Maagan-GinovkerIntroductionIn the period between the two world wars, the typical Jewish family in Poland – as in any society – was influenced by many factors. According to an article by Dalia Ofer and Linor Weizman, the lives of Jewish men and women before the war were conducted according to traditionally defined models. During the 1920s and 1930s, in the majority of Jewish families, similar to that of non-Jewish families, married men were responsible for financially supporting the family. Women, even those who studied a trade or worked in the family business, were responsible for household tasks...
Continue reading...Re-Examining the Tipping Point
70 Years Since the Kristallnacht Pogrom
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionThis article, written on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom, gives a brief historical account of this watershed event and discusses methods for classroom discussion on the subject. In an effort to assist teachers in engaging their students in the subject of the Holocaust in general, and the Kristallnacht pogrom in particular, this article provides varied sources and ideas meant to help students gain a deeper understanding of the event. Additionally, teachers can use different types of resources to facilitate discussions that focus on larger...
Continue reading...Address by Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate
Sixth International Conference on Holocaust Education; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; July 10, 2008
Avner ShalevShalom. I am truly moved as we approach the conclusion of our conference. After listening to what has been said here this morning, I have decided to put aside the text that I had prepared and share some observations with you.The reason that I am so excited about talking with you at the conclusion of this session is the fact that at least one major goal that we had dreamed of eventually achieving when we originally commenced our educational efforts at Yad Vashem, has now come to fruition.Gathered here are more than seven hundred educators, many of you senior professionals. I think that almost all...
Continue reading...Teaching the Holocaust by Highlighting the Youth, their Perseverance, and Creativity
"We Are Children Just the Same"
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionChildren were particularly vulnerable during the Holocaust. Deemed as "unwanted," a threat to future Aryan domination, and too small to be of use to the Nazi war machine, children were killed first in aktionen. The Germans and their collaborators killed more than one million Jewish children during the Holocaust, in gas chambers, upon birth, with malnutrition, and with improper clothing and shelter for extended periods of time. Despite the young ages of these victims, many of them sought to live and remain hopeful in spite of an impending doom. Both the surviving children,...
Continue reading...The Wooden Synagogue of Chodorow
Liz Elsby“Behold All That Was Painted My Hand Has Wrought”
from the painting signature by Israel ben Mordechai Lissnicki of the community of Yartshov.“Few other places throughout the centuries have witnessed more scholarship, friendship, devotion, humility, charity, love, longing, joy, hope, tears and sorrow, than the rooms enclosed by the shtetl synagogue and the bet midrash.”1A vividly painted lion and a unicorn, sloe-eyed and graceful, face each other as if dancing, front legs entwined. The unicorn’s head is bowed, allowing the lion to blow, trumpet-like, on its horn....
Continue reading...from the painting signature by Israel ben Mordechai Lissnicki of the community of Yartshov.“Few other places throughout the centuries have witnessed more scholarship, friendship, devotion, humility, charity, love, longing, joy, hope, tears and sorrow, than the rooms enclosed by the shtetl synagogue and the bet midrash.”1A vividly painted lion and a unicorn, sloe-eyed and graceful, face each other as if dancing, front legs entwined. The unicorn’s head is bowed, allowing the lion to blow, trumpet-like, on its horn....
"What Came Before" - Teaching About Jewish Life Before the Holocaust
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionThe thriving life of European Jewry prior to World War II cannot be overlooked when embarking on a Holocaust curriculum. This article presents several aspects of Prewar Jewish Life in Europe, central to Holocaust education.
While the rich tapestry of Jewish culture goes far beyond the scope of this article, specific elements of Jewish culture, present at the beginning of the twentieth century, are worth studying and teaching in order to contextualize the Holocaust. While the Holocaust is primarily associated with death and destruction, learning about how Jews lived gives a...
Continue reading...While the rich tapestry of Jewish culture goes far beyond the scope of this article, specific elements of Jewish culture, present at the beginning of the twentieth century, are worth studying and teaching in order to contextualize the Holocaust. While the Holocaust is primarily associated with death and destruction, learning about how Jews lived gives a...
The Third Reich and the Theft of a Musical Legacy
Jackie MetzgerIntroductionOne of the most disturbing aspects of the Third Reich and its unprecedented descent into state-organized mass murder is the transition from a civilized, cultured condition to a virtually unchallenged barbarism. This essay is an attempt to highlight a few points along the route that the highly developed German nation traveled from the mid-19th century over the next one hundred years until the end of the Second World War. We will focus on the German world of music and present several examples of how ideas and ideologies burgeoned into practical policies designed to hijack the impressive...
Continue reading...Teaching about German Jewry between 1933 and 1939
“When Their World Changed”
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionThe rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 signaled a turning point for 525,000 German Jews that would take years to unfold in the rest of Europe. The ultimate result was World War II and the Holocaust, but long before the ultimate devastation of world Jewry, German Jews felt their world turn upside-down as the emancipation they had achieved came to an end. In the previous newsletter, we discussed the importance of teaching the history of Jews long before the war, when they thrived in communities all over Europe. This newsletter is more localized, as it focuses specifically on...
Continue reading...Felix Nussbaum: Self Portraits of a Jew in Turmoil
Liz ElsbyCreating art can be an exhilarating yet painful process for an artist as he grapples with his emotions, his vision, his message, and his limitations. Throughout his artistic life, an artist grows, learns his craft, explores, and matures in a very personal process. However, external factors like war, upheaval, and social change can rob an artist of the ability to freely pursue his inner calling, and cause him to use his art as a vehicle to record and attempt to contextualize the chaos enveloping him.Felix Nussbaum was such an artist: a German Jew caught in the relentless downward spiral of Nazi...
Continue reading...The Third Reich: Classical Music and the Nazi Leadership, 1933-1945
Jackie MetzgerIntroductionThe Third Reich entered the annals of history as the most extreme aberration of civilized society. Its benchmark was the murder of millions of people in the name of an elaborate ideology that planned to divide the world into superior and inferior race groupings. From 1933 until 1945, the Nazi leadership planned, organized, and executed their ideas, inflicting relentless misery in the European arena. Nearly seventy years after the war, the singularity of the period still generates more attention than most other episodes in history.This essay, as part of that phenomenon, is the second...
Continue reading...The Female Couriers During the Holocaust
Sheryl Silver OchayonIntroductionThe story of the female couriers of Nazi-occupied Europe is a story of resistance that has largely remained in the shadows, or perhaps been overshadowed by the stories of armed resistance in the ghettos of Europe. Yet it is a story of incredible bravery exhibited by a group of Jewish girls – some as young as fifteen years old – and women in their late teens and early twenties. These girls braved danger and death in order to serve as the lifeline between Jewish communities throughout war-torn Europe. Disguised as non-Jews, they transported documents, papers, money and ultimately...
Continue reading...Teaching about Women and Resistance
"They Each Made a Difference"
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionIn defining resistance during the Holocaust, we see a wide range of acts that directly or indirectly defied Nazi laws, policies, or ideology. Such activities always endangered the lives of those engaged in it, and were taken by both non-Jews and Jews, by men and women. The Final Solution did not distinguish between men and women, however women experienced the degradation and humiliation differently, and are therefore worth studying as a separate group.Under Nazi domination, women sometimes benefited from the stereotypes perpetuated by Nazi ideology, which relegated women to the...
Continue reading...The Family Unit During the Holocaust
“Family Gave Them Strength”
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionDiscussing the subject of the family unit during the Holocaust raises many issues of devastation as well as strength. Professor Dalia Ofer shares many insights about this in an article published in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. She explains that the Holocaust devastated families and Jewish life in general. Nevertheless, there was also considerable strength in family ties. Evidence reveals that some fragments of families remained intact, in ghettos, and in labor and extermination camps, and those who didn’t have family members, created their own alternative...
Continue reading...Reel Witnesses: A New Type of Holocaust Testimony
Yael Weinstock MashbaumThis article highlights four films that have been made by Yad Vashem and Hebrew University that take a survivor back to his/her hometown and hear his/her story on location. It is part of a project that deals with what to do when we can no longer listen to survivor testimony first-hand.
Continue reading...Sephardic Jews in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Greece
"It Happened There Too"
Yael Weinstock MashbaumIntroductionThe Holocaust is described as the destruction of European Jewry. What is often not discussed is the devastation of Sephardic Jews who mainly lived in the area of the Balkans, including Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. These Jews, who can be traced back to their ancestors in Spain before the Jewish expulsion in 1492, lived happily in southeastern Europe for centuries, with their own cultures and traditions. Jews in each country had very different experiences during the Holocaust, and while this newsletter will not be able to address every angle, it will bring to light...
Continue reading...Fifty Years Since the Eichmann Trial
Based on a Lecture Given by Professor Chana Yablonka at Yad Vashem on January 25, 2011
IntroductionThe Eichmann trial was one of three major trials of the 20th century and remains the most highly publicized trial in Israel's history. The Eichmann trial was in fact the only Holocaust trial that took place in Israel. Other trials, such as the Kastner trial and the Demjanjuk trial, cannot really be categorized as Holocaust trials but rather as cases that dealt with specific issues within the history of the Holocaust. During the trial the prosecution sought to cover the entire story of the Holocaust before the Israeli public. However, every story or episode from the Holocaust did...
Continue reading...Jews in Albania
Yael Weinstock Mashbaum“Where Religious Prejudice and Hate Did Not Exist” Herman Bernstein, the United States Ambassador to Albania, in 1934The situation for Jews in Albania during the Holocaust is unique. Almost all Albanian Jews during the Second World War were saved from Hitler’s “Final Solution.” This is remarkable, and a circumstance that cannot be found in any other occupied country in Europe. How did this happen? Why was Albania good to its Jews?
Continue reading...The Eichmann Trial: Introduction and Suggestions for Classroom Use
Yael Weinstock MashbaumAdolf Eichmann’s role in the “Final Solution” is one that has been described in different terms since the end of World War II, especially as Nazi hunting and war crimes trials were beginning. Eichmann served in the Gestapo and the SS as chief of RSHA (Department of Security), and was ultimately responsible for the deportation of over 1.5 million Jews from all over Europe to killing centers and sites in Poland and the Soviet Union. Touting himself and sometimes recognized by others as a mere bureaucrat who sat behind an office desk, it was the specifics of his job, which made him...
Continue reading...Hidden Children In France During the Holocaust
Kathryn BermanIntroductionIn June 1940 after Nazi Germany invaded France, the French surrendered and signed an armistice with the Nazis. France was then divided in two: northern France (the occupied zone) was placed under German control, while southern France (the unoccupied zone) was placed under the control of a new French government, which was established in the spa town of Vichy. At that time, approximately 350,000 Jews lived in France, some of whom were refugees from Germany and other countries occupied by the Nazis, including thousands of children.Almost immediately after the occupation, Jews living in...
Continue reading...From Democracy to Deportation: The Jews of France from the Revolution to the Holocaust
Jackie Metzger, Yael Weinstock MashbaumIn 1791, after the French Revolution, Jews in France were emancipated and granted full citizenship. This was the first time in history, that Jews had been given such equality. Even after the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, French Jewry remained convinced that their place as equals in society would ultimately keep them safe from antisemitism that existed in other European countries. Unfortunately, this was not the case.
As is pointed out later in this article, the motto of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was turned on its head by the Germans when they invaded in May...
Continue reading...As is pointed out later in this article, the motto of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was turned on its head by the Germans when they invaded in May...
Chaim Rudel's Story - Pesach 1943
As related by Claudine Rudel to Kathryn Berman, May 2011
“We left Toulouse and went to the village of Pujaudran, some thirty or fifty kilometers from Toulouse. A Jewish family, the Rubinfelds, moved there before the war, and earned their living growing fruits, wheat, and other cereals.In order to ensure that the produced grain adhered to the highest level of kashrut, even before sowing the seeds, Rabbi Lichtenstein and my father kept watch over the grains and continued to be responsible for the process until the day the wheat was cut and ground to flour.Just a few days after Tu B’shvat (Jewish New Year for Trees), my father started to look...
Continue reading...The Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia
Sheryl Silver OchayonOn the eve of World War II there were 400,000 Jews in French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, sometimes called the “Maghreb”, meaning Arab North Africa), and another 30,000 Jews in Libya, then an Italian colony. The fate of the Jews in North Africa was different depending on the country in which they were located. In Libya, which was an Italian colony, thousands of Jews were sent to labor camps and concentration camps, and almost 600 died in these camps from hunger and disease. In the three North African countries that fell under the regime of Vichy France, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco,...
Continue reading...The Jews of Libya
Sheryl Silver OchayonNot a single Jew remains in Libya today.Though Libya had been home to a Jewish community for thousands of years, and though the Jews had lived under Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Italian, British, and Arab rule, no trace of this once-thriving community exists anymore.
The modern history of Libya can be dated from 1911, when Libya became an Italian colony. Indeed, the fact that Libya was an Italian colony and did not fall under the Vichy regime in France made the fate of the Jews of Libya different from that of the Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. In the early twentieth century, much...
Continue reading...The modern history of Libya can be dated from 1911, when Libya became an Italian colony. Indeed, the fact that Libya was an Italian colony and did not fall under the Vichy regime in France made the fate of the Jews of Libya different from that of the Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. In the early twentieth century, much...
The Jews of North Africa
Jackie MetzgerIn most of the history written on the Second World War, North Africa assumes secondary importance as compared with the main arenas of Europe and the Pacific War. In general, British interests in maintaining free access to the Suez Canal in Egypt and French or Italian colonial interests across the top of Africa fade in importance against the massive confrontation ignited by conflicting German–Soviet aspirations in Europe.However, the theater of North Africa was intensely felt by the armies that fought there, the populations that lived there and the Jewish communities that suffered there during...
Continue reading...Interdisciplinary Education
Jackie MetzgerOne of the problems of teaching the Holocaust is the unprecedented behavior of humanity during the Second World War and finding a believable way of presenting it. It is a difficult task to convey realities from that era to pupils and students seventy years removed from the atrocities. This article will suggest ways of presenting aspects of the Holocaust that combine different approaches to enable cognitive contact with a difficult subject.Interdisciplinary education is basically the combination of different disciplines to promote contact, understanding and knowledge of the matter being taught....
Continue reading...Are There Boundaries to Artistic Representations of the Holocaust?
Franziska ReinigerArtistic representation of the Holocaust has become a matter of some controversy. The controversy focuses around questions such as: Can art represent the Holocaust? And if so, in what way should it be represented? Can it give us a picture or an image of the Holocaust? Can art teach us anything about the Holocaust? Should there be limitations to the artistic representation of the Holocaust? Where should the boundaries be? Who should decide these boundaries?This article discusses two of the controversies:The limits of art as proof or testimony.The moral limits of artistic representation.The limits...
Continue reading...Commemoration in the Art of Holocaust Survivors
Sheryl Silver OchayonWe are accustomed to reading testimonies of Holocaust survivors, or of hearing survivors speak and tell their stories. However, words, in whatever form they may take, are not the only avenue of commemoration or documentation, and sometimes they are insufficient to express the full range of feelings of a survivor. There are those Holocaust survivors who have chosen instead to use not words, but paper, canvas, clay, and other materials as the medium through which they express themselves. Primo Levi1 wrote:On many occasions, we survivors of the Nazi concentration camps have come to notice how...
Continue reading...“Coping through Art - Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the children of Theresienstadt”
Liz ElsbyWHEN the Jews were deported to Theresienstadt ghetto from Prague and environs in 1942, they were instructed to bring with them only 50 kilos. The dilemma of how to pack into a suitcase one’s entire past life for an unknown future life must have been a daunting one. What to bring? Most deportees packed clothing, household articles, valuables, photo albums and the like. However, artist and teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis used her weight allowance in a different way. After packing a few necessary items of clothing, she chose to fill the rest of her weight quota with art supplies. Her...
Continue reading...The Survivors of the Holocaust
An Overview
Anita Shapira, Irit KeynanLiberationSpring was never as beautiful as in 1945: six years of the most terrible of wars had come to an end; the Nazi regime had been beaten and defeated. Allied soldiers from the West and the East met over the smoking ruins of Berlin. Throughout Europe, people celebrated the victory and the end of the war. On both sides of the line that was soon to be called the “Iron Curtain,” a popular burst of joy and spontaneous brotherhood heralded the end of the nightmare of war, and brought, for a fleeting moment, hope for a new start to humanity.One people did not share in the general euphoria:...
Continue reading...Commemoration and Poetry
Jackie MetzgerThe memory of the Holocaust has been invaluably enriched by poets who have provided us with a window into a period that is very difficult to comprehend. Numerous Holocaust-related anthologies have been published in many languages in recent years, and these are an excellent educational resource.It has been said that what the historian achieves in a book, the poet presents in ten or twenty lines. Poetry can say more in less, and certainly can say it more succinctly. When a poem works, a truth has been stated. That truth is the poet’s own experience and the well-springs of personal experience...
Continue reading...Holocaust Hero: Lena Küchler-Silberman
Dr. Sharon GevaWhen a mother leaves home, the whole house is turned upside down. This premise has served as the basis of a reality series, in which two families swap mothers, changing everything about their respective homes including rules, routine and restrictions. The assumption was that while switching fathers would change little, the moment a family is assigned a new, surrogate mother nothing about the household would remain the same. In this TV series, the mothers came home after a week, reuniting with their biological, nuclear families, with tears in their eyes. Their children were forced to learn how the...
Continue reading...How We Approach Teaching About the Shoah
Shulamit ImberThe Human Being as the CenterOur educational rationale places the human being, the individual, at the center of our understanding of history. Facing the Holocaust means probing not only such phenomena as mass murder, Nazi policy, the statistics of death and the chain of historical, political and military events. It involves an attempt to understand human beings and the manner in which they contended with extreme situations and with profound ethical dilemmas. The story of the Holocaust is first and foremost a human story. Any discussion of its victims, its perpetrators or those who stood by and...
Continue reading...Stanislaw Grocholski is Recognized as Righteous Among the Nations
Sheryl Silver OchayonWhen I was growing up in America, my mother never spoke to me about the Holocaust. Now and then, when my father watched TV movies about World War II, and the extermination of millions of Jews was mentioned, my mother would sit in the kitchen watching with him, tears running down her face. But she never spoke. I didn’t understand why the events that took place in faraway Europe seemed so close to her, but I didn’t even know what questions to ask. I was about 12 when my parents took me to see the movie, “The Sound of Music”. The bad guys in the movie wore armbands that were...
Continue reading...The Holocaust of the French Jews – A Historical Review
Liraz LachmanovichThe history of the Jews in France during the Holocaust and the Second World War constitutes a unique and complex chapter in the history of the Holocaust of European Jewry. Various factors combined to create a different reality than in the other countries under German occupation. These include the internal divisions in the Jewish community between veteran Jews and immigrants; the French Vichy regime and its collaboration with German interests relating to the persecution of the Jews; public opinion among the civilian population; and the underground and rescue actions by Jews and non-Jews. The following...
Continue reading...The Jewish Resistance Movement in France
Bilhah Shilo“Every Jew in France clearly understands that the only thing that can ensure the Hewish people’s salvation is the manly life-or-death fight between us and the Hitlerians. This alone will ensure the survival of the Jewish people […] We must create more and more combat units of the Communist underground. We will attack the enemy wherever it is to be found; we will embitter its life; we will destroy its means of communication and shut down its war machine. We will participate in the daily fighting that will lead to the national uprising.”1(Kolenu, May-June 1943) The call...
Continue reading...The Prisoners of the Women’s Concentration Camp, Ravensbrück
Oh, my brother, once there will be the day when no roll call will keep us!
Gates will be opened wide and the great, the free world will embrace us.
And then we concentration camp inmates will walk on wide streets.
But the others are waiting for us.
And whoever sees us, sees the deep lines written on our faces by the suffering,
Sees the signs of our mental and bodily torture, which will stay with us forever.
And whoever sees us will see the rage flashing bright from our eyes,
Sees the rejoicing in freedom deeply imbedded in our hearts.
And then we march in rows, the...
Continue reading...Gates will be opened wide and the great, the free world will embrace us.
And then we concentration camp inmates will walk on wide streets.
But the others are waiting for us.
And whoever sees us, sees the deep lines written on our faces by the suffering,
Sees the signs of our mental and bodily torture, which will stay with us forever.
And whoever sees us will see the rage flashing bright from our eyes,
Sees the rejoicing in freedom deeply imbedded in our hearts.
And then we march in rows, the...
Canada and the Holocaust: Survivor Memoirs for Students of All Ages
Richelle Budd CaplanOn November 7, 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology in the House of Commons in Ottawa regarding the fate of the MS St. Louis and its more than 900 passengers. Trudeau apologized to the passengers, their families, and Jewish communities in Canada and around the world.On May 13, 1939, the MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg for Havana, carrying mostly Jewish passengers who were desperate to escape persecution in Nazi Germany. Although all the Jewish refugees on board had valid visas, they were denied entry into Cuba. Since the United States and Canada...
Continue reading...Solidarity in the Forest – The Bielski Brothers
Franziska Reiniger“Don’t rush to fight and die. So few of us are left, we need to save lives. It is more important to save Jews than to kill Germans.”1Tuvia Bielski
Continue reading...Jewish Solidarity in the Holocaust: The Individual and the Community
Jackie MetzgerThree Quotes: A Philosophical Note on the TitleWe preface the following essay on solidarity during the Holocaust with the three quotes below in order to highlight the stark contrast between the extreme difficulties of survival and the historical examples of fortitude that follow.
Continue reading...“I shall be what I shall be” - The Story of Rabbiner Regina Jonas
Liz Elsby…But if I must say what drove me as a woman to become a rabbi, two elements come to mind: My belief in the godly calling and my love of people. God has placed abilities and callings in our hearts, without regard to gender. Thus each of us has the duty, whether man or woman, to realize those gifts God has given….1The story of Regina Jonas is a story that has been forgotten for many years. It is a story of bravery and of one woman's struggle: to become a rabbi, and through this position to do what she did best – use her love of humanity to minister to the Jews around her who...
Continue reading...Critical Analysis of Photographs as Historical Sources
Sheryl Silver OchayonIt has been said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The notion here is that a single image is enough to present an idea so complicated that hundreds of words are required to do it justice. If this is so, then photographs, which are direct and unadulterated expressions of the reality seen by the camera, should be the unsurpassed and unequaled medium for expressing truth – including the truths of the Holocaust. The strength of photographs as expressions of the truth come from their “mechanical aura and the verisimilitude that [they] convey.”1 As Walter...
Continue reading...What is the Photograph's Context?
The Auschwitz Album
Sheryl Silver OchayonWhen World War II ended in the spring of 1945, Lili1 Jacob was a young Jewish girl of about eighteen, physically broken. She weighed only 80 pounds and fell victim to typhus at Dora, a Nazi slave labor camp, after a death march from Auschwitz to one labor camp after another. After a few days in the clinic, Lili heard shouts, “The Americans are here!” She got up to see for herself, but collapsed before she could get very far. Fellow prisoners carried her into a barrack at the camp that had previously been an SS barrack. When she came to, she was cold. She looked through a cupboard...
Continue reading...The Eastern Front: Photographs as Propaganda
Liz ElsbyThe photographs taken by German soldiers and police officers of the abuse, deportation and murder of the Jews they encountered in the occupied Eastern territories starting in 1939 still hold the power to shock and horrify us more than seventy years later. These photographs are the result of the camera being used as a weapon to commemorate acts of violence, brutality and cruelty committed against helpless victims.But what is the impetus behind taking such pictures – why were they taken? And if we then understand that these photographs were not only taken, but were distributed and placed into...
Continue reading...Inside the Epicenter of the Horror – Photographs of the Sonderkommando
Franziska ReinigerAmong the millions of photographs that are related to Nazi death camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They show a completely different perspective, which makes them unique when dealing with visual material of the Holocaust and the Holocaust as a topic itself. They were taken inside the epicenter of the horror, from which no other visual material exists. They were taken clandestinely at the height of the Final Solution in 1944 by one of the so-called Sonderkommando – Jewish prisoners forced to help carry...
Continue reading...Who Took The Pictures?
The Ghetto Photography of Mendel Grossman in Lodz, As Compared With the Ghetto Photography of German "Ghetto Tourists"
Sheryl Silver OchayonIn assessing the use of photographs as tools in commemorating the Holocaust, and as historical sources, one of the most important issues that we must be aware of is who the photographer was. Who took the pictures? The photographer, as a human being, may be using his camera to express himself or his views. He may romanticize his subject or treat it with disdain.In this article, we will compare pictures taken in the ghettos. The first segment deals with pictures taken by Mendel Grossman in Lodz, pictures that were taken with a great deal of empathy. Grossman's pictures were meant to create a...
Continue reading...Armed Resistance in the Krakow and Bialystok Ghettos
Sheryl Silver OchayonAlthough the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the most celebrated act of armed resistance during the Holocaust, this article will focus on two lesser-known, but very important, acts of armed resistance: those in the ghettos of Krakow and Bialystok.Just as there was no uniformity among the German-created ghettos of Europe with respect to the degree of their isolation, their establishment, their physical circumstances, and other facets of ghetto life, there was no uniformity among the ghettos with respect to armed resistance. While in Warsaw and in other ghettos resistance occurred inside...
Continue reading...Armed Resistance in the Ghettos: The Dilemma of Revolt
Sheryl Silver OchayonThe dire circumstances of life in the ghettos forced the ghetto residents to struggle for survival on a daily basis. Thousands died of hunger, cold, disease and overcrowding. Physical survival was the primary battle of the ghetto residents. Engaging in armed resistance was a different, and much more difficult, type of battle. Most ghetto residents, including infants, children, the elderly and the sick, had neither the will nor the strength required for armed resistance. Those who did attempt to engage in armed resistance had to find within themselves the extra determination, resolve and physical...
Continue reading...Rapoport's Memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – a Personal Interpretation
Liz ElsbyBravery. Sacrifice. Towering heroism. These are the lofty words that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial elicits from those who view it, either in Warsaw or at Yad Vashem. The work is a monumental tribute to the bravery and spirit of the Jewish ghetto fighters who audaciously and against all odds stood up to the Nazis in April and May 1943, in an unprecedented uprising.The memorial, created by Nathan Rapoport1 in 1948, and originally erected amidst the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, is a product of its time: from the enormous chasm of postwar loss and chaos, from the shock and mourning of those...
Continue reading...Two Poets and a Dividing Wall
The Poets Wladislaw Szlengel and Czeslaw Milosz on the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto
Jackie MetzgerTwo poets on opposite sides of one great divide,
With angles of vision that must surely collide,
Who will live and who will die
Who will write and who will be denied?This article will focus on two famous poets who, after the German occupation of Warsaw, found themselves on separate sides of the wall dividing the Jewish ghetto from the Aryan part of the city.1 Wladislaw Szlengel, a Jewish writer, became one of the best-known Jewish poets during the difficult days of the ghetto’s existence. Czeslaw Milosz, born in Lithuania in 1911, was a young Polish poet who published...
Continue reading...With angles of vision that must surely collide,
Who will live and who will die
Who will write and who will be denied?This article will focus on two famous poets who, after the German occupation of Warsaw, found themselves on separate sides of the wall dividing the Jewish ghetto from the Aryan part of the city.1 Wladislaw Szlengel, a Jewish writer, became one of the best-known Jewish poets during the difficult days of the ghetto’s existence. Czeslaw Milosz, born in Lithuania in 1911, was a young Polish poet who published...
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Sheryl Silver OchayonWe stand now seventy years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This uprising was born out of the severe oppression suffered by Jews in the ghetto under German occupation. At the same time, the mere fact of its occurrence shattered the limits of the imagination.The situation in Warsaw, the largest ghetto in Europe, was completely different from the situation in any other ghetto. Warsaw was the city with the largest Jewish population in prewar Europe; the number of Jews living in the city was rivaled in the rest of the world only by New York. At its height, almost half a million Jews were imprisoned...
Continue reading...Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during World War II
Dr. Robert RozettFor the vast majority of Hungarian Jews, their family history includes the story of their fathers, sons, brothers and husbands who were drafted into the Labor Service to perform forced labor during the Holocaust. A large percentage of Jewish Labor Service draftees (some 45,000 out of about 100,000) were sent with the Hungarian Second Army to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, primarily from spring 1942 until the summer 1944. Subjected to grinding brutality on the front, the Jewish forced laborers’ suffering was often increased exponentially by the treatment they received at the...
Continue reading...Prewar Jewish Life in Budapest
IntroductionThis article presents a short summary of the history of the Jews of Budapest, the largest of the Jewish communities in prewar Hungary and the Hungarian capital. For the sake of comparison, we have also included in this newsletter a profile of another town in Hungary, the provincial town of Munkács located in the Carpathian Mountains. Whereas Budapest's Jews were, for the most part, assimilated Jews, Munkács was a major center of Hasidic life and learning. While Budapest remained relatively safe until October, 1944, the Jews of Munkács were among the first of the Hungarian Jews...
Continue reading...Prewar Jewish Life in Munkács: A Brief History
This article presents a short summary of the history of the Jews of Munkács. It is presented here for the sake of comparison with the history of the Jews of Budapest, the largest of the Jewish communities in prewar Hungary, profiled in a separate article in this newsletter. Whereas Budapest's Jews were, for the most part, assimilated Jews, Munkács was a major center of Hasidic life and learning. While Budapest remained relatively safe until October, 1944, the Jews of Munkács were among the first of the Hungarian Jews to be deported to Auschwitz, in May, 1944. Many additional comparisons...
Continue reading...Historical Background: The Jews of Hungary During the Holocaust
After Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Hungarian government became interested in making an alliance with Nazi Germany. The Hungarian Government felt that such an alliance would be good for them, in that the two governments maintained similar authoritarian ideologies, and the Nazis could assist Hungary in retrieving land it had lost in World War I. Over the next five years, Hungary moved closer to Germany.
Continue reading...The Shoes on the Danube Promenade – Commemoration of the Tragedy
Sheryl Silver OchayonOn the banks of the Danube River in Budapest, not far from the Hungarian Parliament building, sit sixty pairs of old-fashioned shoes, the type people wore in the 1940s. There are women's shoes, there are men's shoes and there are children's shoes. They sit at the edge of the water, scattered and abandoned, as though their owners had just stepped out of them and left them there.If you look more closely, you see that the shoes are rusted, made of iron and set into the concrete of the embankment. They are a memorial and a monument to the Hungarian Jews who, in the winter of 1944-1945,...
Continue reading...A Survivor Recovers the Boy He Was
Itamar Yaos-Kest Meets Peter Kest… Again
Jackie MetzgerIntroductionItamar Yaos-Kest was born in 1934 in Sarvash, Hungary as Peter Kest and after the Germans invaded in March 1944, he began his childhood Holocaust trauma as a boy of ten years old. Fortunately, he was surrounded by his family right through the terrible camp conditions of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany and against all probability, both parents and the two children survived more than six months in the camp. On scraps of paper his parents procured for him, he began writing his first poems as a ten-year-old in a German concentration camp. As of 2014, Itamar Yaos-Kest lives in...
Continue reading...The Final Days of the Lodz Ghetto
"Full Of Hope And Despair, Full Of Stoical Resignation And, At The Same Time, Full Of Trusting Expectation"
Sheryl Silver OchayonIn the summer of 1944, seventy years ago, there were still more than 77,000 Jews alive in the Lodz ghetto. When put into context, this number is particularly striking. The Jews of Poland had already been decimated. Lodz, which was originally intended to be a temporary ghetto,1 was actually the very last ghetto left in existence in Poland. The Jews in the Lodz ghetto could practically hear the thunder of the Russian artillery from the approaching front.The Jews of the ghetto had been working as slave laborers for the Germans for four years. Busy supplying the German war machine with equipment...
Continue reading...The Jewish Photographer Henryk Ross
"I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom"
Franziska ReinigerOne of the most impressive picture collections that survived WWII was created clandestinely by the Jewish photographer Henryk Ross. Ross was born in 1910. Before the war he had been a sports photographer for a Warsaw newspaper.When the Lodz Ghetto was sealed by the Germans in May 1940, Ross was forced to move into the ghetto. He managed to get a job as one of the official photographers in the ghetto. Along with his colleague Mendel Grossman, Ross was in charge of producing identity and propaganda photographs for the Department of Statistics in the Lodz Ghetto. Due to his task, Ross had access...
Continue reading...The Lodz Ghetto – Historical Background
Lodz, southwest of Warsaw, was the second largest city in Poland before the war. On the eve of World War II, it maintained a population of 665,000, 34% (about 233,000) of whom were Jewish. Lodz also had a sizable German minority, amounting to 10% of the overall population. Lodz was Poland's textile center and many Jews worked within this industry.On September 8, 1939, the Germans occupied Lodz. They annexed it to the Reich and renamed it Litzmannstadt (after the German General Karl Litzmann, who had captured the city in World War I). Persecution of Jews began immediately after the...
Continue reading...The Legend of the Lodz Ghetto Children
Sheryl Silver OchayonIt was the beginning of 1942. In the Lodz ghetto, thousands of Jews1 were spirited off to the unknown on trains. The unknown turned out to be Chelmno, the very first death camp, where 55,000 Jews of the ghetto were murdered between January and May, 1942. Many of the deported Jews were young children and the elderly, those who did not work and consequently were considered "unproductive" by the Germans. In the ghetto, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish leadership, believed that the only way to keep the Jews of the ghetto alive was to open factories and workshops...
Continue reading...Coping With Reality: Two Teenage Poets in the Lodz Ghetto
Avraham Cytryn and Avremek Koplowicz
Jackie MetzgerThe Lodz ghetto by all accounts embodied one of the worst cases of human suffering in an enclosed virtual prison for an extended period of time. It was the longest standing ghetto, from 1940 until its final denouement in the autumn of 1944. The fact of its total isolation from the rest of the city multiplied the effect of the near-total lack of all necessities for maintaining life.Within this reality, we find the human spirit reacting in every possible variant from paralyzing depression to the writing of poetry.We present in this article two examples of this extraordinary human quality that display...
Continue reading...Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland After Liberation
After liberation, Jewish survivors emerged from labor and concentration camps, crept carefully from hiding places, and cast off borrowed identities. They stood up and looked around at the smoking ruins and mountains of rubble that much of Europe had become while they had been incarcerated or hidden. Their first step, after evading death, was to search for family, friends and neighbors who might, like themselves, have somehow managed to remain alive in the inferno against all odds. Many decided to go back to their prewar homes, but in some places, especially in Eastern Europe, Jews met with severe...
Continue reading...The Difficulties Involved in the Rescue of Children By Non-Jews – Before and After Liberation
Sandra RosenfeldIn many of the countries of Nazi-occupied Europe, Jewish parents tried to save their children by hiding them with non-Jews who were brave enough to help. When the war ended, these non-Jewish rescuers, together with the children they had hidden, found themselves in a very difficult reality. This article will try to present a glimpse into the complexity of the situation of the children at war's end. What did liberation hold for them? What happened to their identity with the changes of names, homes (parents) and religions they had experienced? What was to be done with the children whose parents...
Continue reading...Displaced Persons Camps
When World War II ended and the German occupied territories were liberated by the Allied soldiers, those soldiers encountered hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived the Holocaust. These people had survived years in hiding, in the ghettos or camps. Now that they were liberated many tried immediately to return to their homes. There they faced many difficulties. They suddenly realized that they had no place to go. Their homes, families, friends, entire villages and towns didn't exist anymore. In some places, particularly in Eastern Europe, survivors who had returned home encountered antisemitism...
Continue reading...Liberation and the Return to Life
The First Moments of Liberation
World War II ended in May 1945. After six years of war, there were victory celebrations all throughout the streets of Europe. For the Jewish survivors, though, the victory had been too long in coming. Entire Jewish communities in Europe had been wiped out and their Jews exterminated. For instance, the Jewish community in Poland, the largest in Europe, had been decimated: of the 3,500,000 Jews living in Poland before 1939, only 250,000 were still alive, most of them in the Soviet Union; fully 93 percent had perished.1 In all of Europe, not including the Soviet Union, where over seven million...
Continue reading...Poetry At Liberation
Jackie MetzgerIn the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem, there is a big screen near the end depicting the celebrations and jubilation across the whole of Europe after the Germans surrendered at the beginning of May 1945. One can view Stalin presiding over a huge military parade at the Kremlin, De Gaulle driving in a motorcade towards the Eiffel Tower and snatches of Churchill and Montgomery joining in the general revelry.The pointed irony of this screen is that after more than 200 years of integrated contact between Germans and Jews in Germany, from Moses Mendelssohn's entry into Berlin in the mid-18th century...
Continue reading...Echoes & Reflections Educator Video Toolboxes
Teaching about the Holocaust can be challenging. The topic is complex and the task may at times seem overwhelming. In order to support effective teaching about the Holocaust using Echoes & Reflections, Yad Vashem’s International School of Holocaust Studies has created the Educator Video Toolbox, specifically aligned with the Echoes & Reflections program.The Video Toolbox is designed to be exactly what its name suggests: a “toolbox” to provide visual cues and primary source materials edited into short films that help educators teach the Holocaust. The focus is on methodological...
Continue reading...Echoes & Reflections: Hearing the Voices of the Victims
The story of the Jewish victim is at the center of our study of the Holocaust. How should we tell this story? What should we focus on? What are the resources we can use to bring it to life? We should not see the Holocaust as the murder of six million anonymous Jews, but we should understand, rather, that six million times during the Holocaust an individual Jew with a name and a face was murdered.At Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies, we believe that the aim of the educator must be to "see" the victim as an individual rather than as a statistic, and to communicate...
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