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30
5
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Dachau
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Pixabay
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dachau
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Educators
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This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
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Natalie Glees, 25, teacher
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July 2021
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Third Reich Tour in Munich
Description
An account of the resource
I recently returned from a two week mini "Grand Tour" of Europe. The last stop on our itinerary was the Bavarian capital, Munich. As a World History teacher, I had to sign up for the Third Reich walking tour of the city. Along the two hour walk, we saw many significant sites like the Nazi Headquarters, Dodger’s Alley, and Hofbrauhaus. However, the most remarkable moment for me was actually the very end of the tour.
As we stood in Marienplatz, the last stop on our journey, our guide asked if we had any questions. The ten of us looked around at each other and remained silent, except for one man who asked, “How is Nazi history taught in German schools?” Our tour guide explained that when he was in high school in the 1980s, he learned about Nazi history for about two weeks. After a tumultuous year, teaching online during the pandemic, I only had about two weeks to teach most units which spanned hundreds of years, rather than a few decades. He added that his children who are currently in school spend about two months learning about the Nazi period. Additionally, every student in Bavaria is required to visit Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany.
I was in awe listening to how the German education system teaches the darkest period in the country’s history. I thought about how I learned about slavery in the US when I was a student. I grew up in Northern Virginia, an area rich in Civil War sites and mansions owned by slaveholders. However, our field trip to Mount Vernon in 1st grade and trip to a Civil War era mansion in 4th grade completely ignored the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the grounds. Then I considered how controversial teaching accurate history in the US has become, especially the last few years. I reflected on how I taught. I try to provide students with a more detailed understanding of often oversimplified topics like slavery, colonialism, and imperialism but was I doing enough? What perspectives was I missing?
Germany’s commitment to providing a thorough and accurate understanding of one the most inhumane and difficult topics to teach motivated me to improve upon my instruction for the upcoming school year. I hope to reframe many units to highlight the experience of the oppressed and those who tried to enact change, rather than focusing on the elite who fought to maintain control.
Title
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Facing History is Not a Walk in the Park
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facing-history-not-walk-park
Europe
History Education
Holocaust
Teachers & Teaching
World History
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http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/512/Auschwitz.png
36b3932ee9dfcaf970464a5cf01132cb
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Auschwitz-Birkenau
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auschwitz-birkenau
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Rebecca Watt
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Educators
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This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
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professional development
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Rebecca Watt, Social Studies Teacher and avid traveler
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2008
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Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
Description
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We (my mother, father, sister, and I) were travelling in Poland (where my mother's family is from). One of the places we visited was Auschwitz.
Every year I teach about World War II including the Holocaust. I share photos from my travels with my students throughout the school year, but it is something I was not able to photograph that chokes me up every year. The shoes. There is a large room, really more of a warehouse, with what looks like a large aquarium along one side (glass floor to ceiling). It is mostly (and used to be) full of shoes. Over time the shoes have begun to disintegrate and settled, making the number look smaller than what they represent. Knowing that it was common for individuals to have only one pair, maybe two pairs, of shoes means that every pair represents a person. You can talk about the sheer number of people who died in the Holocaust, in World War II, but those are abstract and sometimes too large to comprehend. But the shoes make those numbers real - real people, real families, real lives lost...maybe people my mother's family knew or lived near or went to school with. People who were removed from their homes, put on trains, sorted when they disembarked, stripped of their possessions and identities and murdered. Every year when I talk about this with my students, I have to pause and collect myself. And every year I hope that I am providing a sense of the personal into our history class so they don't ask the question "why are we learning about this?"
Title
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The Shoes
History Education
Holocaust
Teachers & Teaching
World War II (1939-1945)
-
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Statues
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statues
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From one of my graduate students at Penn State (Morgane Haesen, whose "Moment" you published)
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Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University
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Spring 2021
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<em>Night and Fog </em>(1955)
Description
An account of the resource
“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
Title
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“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory
Creator
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Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais
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il-faut-le-savoir
Documentary Films
Emotional Experience
Film and Movies
Historical Memory
History
History Education
Holocaust
Memorials
Memory
Teachers & Teaching
War
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Auschwitz Image
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Pixabay
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auschwitz-image
Dublin Core
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Graduate Student Residents 2020
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graduate-student-summer-residents-2020
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VGSSR
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Samantha Lack, 38, PhD Candidate
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Middle School
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Night by Elie Wiesel
Description
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I came across Night by Elie Wiesel while in middle school. I found it at my school library and the barbed wire and shadow of a boy on the cover immediately caught my attention. I was captivated from the very first page and read the entire book that evening. I did not fully understand the power and life lessons of the work at twelve years old but I felt awe and knew it was special.
I have read Night several times since then and am reminded each time of its importance. One of the main themes is the struggle of faith. As a boy, Eliezer valued his faith but began to struggle once he was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager in 1944. He questioned why God did not intervene on behalf of the Jews and why he would allow such evil. Eliezer did not stay long at Auschwitz but it was the last place he saw his mother and younger sister alive. He was in three different concentration camps between the time he left Auschwitz and his liberation, and he became angrier and more spiritually broken as time went on. Eliezer's anger was the result of the atrocities committed to him, his family, and all others with him in the concentration camps. The death of his father, which came three months before the liberation, was the final straw that destroyed his will to survive. He was so emotionally, physically, and mentally defeated by the time he was liberated that he no longer felt human and could not even fathom revenge. He just needed to eat, heal, and begin the process of learning how to feel human again.
Night is haunting, real, and relevant. I was introduced to dehumanization the first time I read it, which affected me greatly. As a middle schooler, I knew bad things happened but it was hard for me to relate. My world was not perfect but I did not truly grasp that some people intentionally treated others inhumanely. This opened my eyes and it was the first time I really thought deeply about the experiences of others. Night helped me begin to learn empathy. It also awakened a desire to learn and understand more about human experiences, both past and present. In many ways, my interaction with Night helped shape the social and cultural historian I am today.
Night is relevant in the world today. The hate and dehumanization that is happening in American and around the world is not new. So often people look away when injustices occur because they are not affected, do not care, or hate the particular people of group. Wiesel’s work stands as a reminder that we are all equal and that no one should be unempathetic to the suffering of others.
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” ~ Elie Wiesel
Title
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Night
Identifier
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night
Books & Reading
Cultural History
Education
Historical Memory
Holocaust
Night
Wiesel, Elie
World War II (1939-1945)
-
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e51cbdff55a46a73f31cf8af2938b365
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Anne Frank House
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anne-frank-house
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Jared Willis, 34, Student
Date
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2001
Description
An account of the resource
At the age of 16, I had the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam with my family. Even at an early age, I had a genuine interest in history and different cultures of the world, and I had never traveled outside of the country, so I was very excited about this trip.
In our travels through the city, I had many wonderful experiences. I visited several nice restaurants, had seen interesting live performances, and soaked up the culture everywhere I went. I went to the Van Gogh museum and beautiful Catholic churches hidden throughout seemingly regular neighborhoods. The most memorable venture for me, however, was when I went to the Anne Frank house.
I don't think anything can necessarily prepare a person for an experience like that. Sure, one can read about the atrocities of the mid-twentieth century that took place all over Europe - worldwide, really - and one can view photographs online of the reprehensible things that were done to people over the course of that time, but it's difficult to fully comprehend what people were subjected to until you are actually standing in the same space where it all occurred.
Behind a normal-looking, innocuous bookshelf on the top floor in what used to be Anne Frank's father's business, opened up a single space that was approximately 450 square feet in size. For two years, eight people hid in this tiny space from an invader who was determined to find and exterminate people like them. Upon entering that room, I was floored. I couldn't believe that they were forced to live like that - in hiding from murderous tyrants.
I think that's when I realized the power of the human spirit and its will to survive. What lengths could a person be willing to go to simply stay alive and protect the ones he or she loves? I posit that that limit doesn't exist; people will likely do anything necessary to survive.
Title
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Visiting the Anne Frank House
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visiting-the-anne-frank-house
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Family
Frank, Anne
History
Holocaust
World War II (1939-1945)