Echoes: Hearing the Voices of the Survivors

Shalom and welcome to the 35th issue of Teaching the Legacy.

Some months ago, we lost Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, number A-7713, prolific author, Nobel laureate and the voice of many survivors. Elie Wiesel once said, “For whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness.”

It is in this spirit that we present the current edition of Teaching the Legacy. In this edition you will find the voices of survivors such as Alexander Bogen, Yehuda Bacon, and Shela Altarez, as well as the voice of a second generation author, Melvin Bukiet. You will also find an article about teaching the Holocaust using the pedagogy developed at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies and reflected in the Echoes and Reflections professional development program for American educators, which teaches the Holocaust by Hearing the Voices of the Victims. An additional article discusses the Holocaust Educator Video Toolbox films, created to provide educators with methodological and pedagogical suggestions that aid with the often daunting task of teaching the Holocaust, as well as practical materials and discussion points for classrooms and groups.

We hope you will enjoy the issue. After reading the interviews and the articles and listening to the witnesses, you will surely become a witness. We close with another Elie Wiesel quote. At the opening ceremony of the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem on March 15, 2005, Elie Wiesel said,

“And so we go through the museum and we do not understand. All we know is that it happened. [...] what should we do? Weep? No! My good friends – we never try to tell the tale to make people weep. It is too easy. We did not want pity. If we decided to tell the tale - it is because we wanted the world to be a better world – just a better world and learn and remember...”

The Editorial staff
December 2016

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...

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...

Interview with Shela Altaraz, Holocaust Survivor

Bilhah Shilo, Liraz Lachmanovich

Interviews, Holocaust Survivors

On Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day in 2015, Shela Altaraz was one of the Torchlighters along with five others. Altaraz, the sole survivor of the Jewish community of Štip, Macedonia, that perished in Treblinka, says “until today, on the deportation lists, I am registered as deceased along with my entire family. I haven’t corrected that Rochale Tzion died in Treblinka with the rest of her family.”In an interview first published in our Hebrew e-Newsletter for educators, Shela Altaraz, nee Tzion, describes the hardships she endured during the war...

Interview With Melvin Jules Bukiet, Author and Professor, Sarah Lawrence College

Sheryl Silver Ochayon

Scholars and Educators

“If I could shape the way people think,” Melvin Bukiet hypothesizes to me over a hot mug of tea on a raw March day in New York City, “I would prefer that people approach the topic of the Holocaust through history rather than fiction. But the truth is that more people know about history because of novels they've read than because of history books.” It’s an interesting observation that he backs up with examples. “More people know about Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow because of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace than through reading history books....

Interview with Alexander Bogen, Survivor and Artist

Merav Jano, Michal Sternin

Artists, Holocaust Survivors

Alexander Bogen was born in 1916 in Dorf, Estonia to the Katzenbogen family. When he was one year old, his family moved to Vilna. Bogen studied painting and sculpting in the Faculty of the Arts at Vilna University. After Lithuania was captured by the Nazis, he joined a partisan unit at Narotz Forest and infiltrated the Vilna Ghetto shortly before its liquidation. In the ghetto, Bogen joined the United Partisan Organization (PPO), organized and smuggled groups of people from the ghetto to the forests, where they joined non-Jewish partisans. Bogen commanded one of the units who went on missions which...

Interview with Yehuda Bacon, Holocaust Survivor and Artist

Interviews, Artists, Holocaust Survivors

Yehuda Bacon was born in Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia on July 28, 1929, into a traditional Jewish religious family. His father, Israel Bacon owned a leather factory. He lived with his mother, Ethel and his two sisters Hanna and Bella. In 1942, when he was 13 years old, he was deported to Terezin (Theresienstadt), where he studied with the artists Otto Ungar, Bedřich Fritta and Leo Haas. In 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz where he stayed for 6 months in the “Family Camp” in Birkenau. After 6 months most prisoners of that camp were murdered. Bacon, however, was among...