Examine the acts of resistance that occurred at the killing centers and consider how the ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of these efforts is graded on a different scale.
Even in settings engineered to create docile victims, Jewish prisoners found the strength to fight back.
Ask students how they define resistance. What does resistance look like and what form does it take?
Ask them also if they would expect there to be much resistance in killing centers. Why or why not?
Finally, set the stage for their learning: is revolt meaningful even when it is crushed by the oppressor?
Read together the page on Resistance from the BBC which gives a brief overview of acts of rebellion against the Nazis that occurred within killing centers.
Attempt to clarify any questions that emerge from the reading before splitting the class into groups. Know that group work will also fill in many details.
Each group will be assigned one of the pop-out links which gives more context and introduces primary sources about specific stories of resistance.
Assign the following pop-out links first, reserving the other links for exceptionally large classes:
‘secret meetings’
‘resistance outside’
‘saved others’
‘defiance’
‘uprising’
‘saved others’
‘terrible consequences’
Once divided into groups, give each group the task of examining their particular word. It will be their job to report to the group what is meant by the term and summarize the example that is provided. Ask that students not only prepare to speak for 2-3 minutes on their term, but also identify points they would like to investigate more deeply.
The goal for the class is to understand the particularities or nuances to this brief summary.
Read the summary again, prompting the group assigned to the word to fill in details about what they learned from their own investigation.
At the end, ask each group to identify what more they would like to know, given the research they did for today’s exercise.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will learn about resistance during the Holocaust, particularly the Jewish partisans that joined resistance movements.
At great risk, some Jews were able to escape from the ghettos and camps and formed their own fighting units, or partisans, to resist Nazi occupation and threats.
Start by asking your students, “What is resistance?”
Have students call out ways in which they think Jews resisted during the Holocaust and write those answers down on the board.
Define a partisan for the class, explaining that a partisan is, “a member of an armed group formed to fight against an occupying force.” Further this explanation by telling your students that these groups would typically use irregular, or guerrilla, forms of fighting such as sabotage and hit-and-run attacks.
More will be added to this list after reading through the resource, so make sure there is space available. Another aspect of this activity is to debunk the myth that there was little or no resistance. Filling the board with the different types of resistance will help students visualize how much there was.
Read through the resource, Jewish Partisans by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a class. When you are finished, ask students to give more examples of how Jews resisted and add these to the list you have started on the board.
Is this more or less than they expected? Let students know that this is one category of resistance, and that in later lessons they can look into resistance that took place in ghettos and in the camps.
Instruct students to take 5-10 minutes for a quick-write answering the following prompt:
“Resistance does not have to be with a gun or a bullet.” What do you think of when you read this quote? What comes to mind? (Prompt from lesson by Echoes & Reflections)
Reconvene as a class and ask people to share their thoughts.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will learn about life in the ghettos, including what it meant to be a young child in one.
Everyone, including children, tried to maintain aspects of normal life despite the tragic conditions in the ghettos.
Begin by asking students what they know about ghettos. Ensure students know the basics, that ghettos were typically closed off parts of a city where Jews were forced to live.
Ask if they can list off any health or emotional challenges that could be faced by living in one.
Read through the resource, Life in the Ghettos by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as a class. Scroll through the images and videos in the left hand corner to show the class. Find the video titled, “Gerda Weissmann Klein describes her birthday celebration in the Bielsko ghetto” and watch that as a class.
Ask the students how their initial list matches up to the reality of what they learned from life in the ghettos.
Have the students list some examples of how people tried to maintain “normal” life in the ghettos.
Tell the students they will now have the chance to go back into the reading and write down a few notes using the 3Ps method- writing down something they find a) Powerful b) Puzzling and c) Propelling.
In order to familiarize yourself, and your class with this model, please look over this guide: 3Ps: A Critical Reading Guide.
Allow the students to pair up in groups of two or three to go over what they wrote down for their 3Ps. As they do so, provide them with the following instructions:
Go over your notes from the reading, try to answer one another’s puzzling sections.
Then discuss the following questions:
If time permits, come back together as a class to share what was discussed. Make sure to let students know that if they are unable to find clarity for something in the ‘puzzling’ notes to bring it up to you to be discussed.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will learn about the difficult circumstances that survivors faced after the war in rebuilding their lives, and learn about the different factors in many people’s decision not to return to the countries where they had previously lived.
Often, Jewish survivors made the decision to settle in countries besides their native ones after the war because their families, communities, and lives back home had been destroyed and they faced continued violence and antisemitism there.
Ask the students what kinds of problems they thought survivors might have faced when they were finally liberated. Lead a short discussion, based on previous knowledge of the war and the Holocaust, about the difficulties in rebuilding people’s lives.
Read the resource, Survivors and the Displaced Persons era by ‘The Holocaust Explained,’ The Wiener Holocaust Library with the class, including the accompanying images. You can stop reading at the section titled, ‘German-Jewish Communities Outside the Camps.’ Take time to answer questions to the best of your ability and clarify if necessary. Ask students to take notes on key facts that stood out to them about why survivors felt they could not return to their home countries, or the antisemitism they continued to encounter.
As a class, discuss the reasons why many people may have chosen not to move back to countries such as Poland or Hungary at the end of the war.
Lead a discussion with students about what the word “home,” “country,” or “citizenship” means to them, and how difficult it would be to have lost these things. Make sure to discuss how difficult it was to feel as if you could not go back to where you were before because you might be injured or worse, but how other countries did not want you, either.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Combining a lesson from the UCL Center and the USHMM resources, students will gain an understanding of what concentration camps were like between 1939-42.
Unlike a typical prison system, concentration camps held people with no regard to legal basis for arrest and imprisonment.
Provide students with a blank A5 piece of paper (postcard sized) and a pencil. Give students just 2-3 minutes to sketch what they think a Nazi concentration camp looked like. Assure them that their artistic skills are not the main focus, rather this exercise seeks to visualize their prior knowledge and understanding of concentration camps.
In groups of four, ask students to create a gallery with the images they created. Ask them to talk about the similarities and differences between the sketches.
Direct students to the resource, Concentration Camps, 1939-42 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Read through the first two sections, “Expansion of the Camp System” and “Establishment of New Camps” as a class.
Direct student attention to the list of camps: Gusen, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, Natzweiler, Stuffhof, and Majdanek. Click on one of the camps on the list to show students what type of information can be found for each one. Scroll to the bottom of the page to show where the discussion questions will be.
In the same groups that they are already working with, assign each group one of the camps from the list. Have students prepare a brief presentation about their assigned camp answering the questions below.
Provide students with the following instructions:
Reconvene as a class. Ask students some new things they learned about concentration camps. Compared to their sketches and what they know now, what would they have changed in their drawing?
Tell students that (as they may now realize) that all camps were different. There is no such thing as a “typical” concentration camp. Different camps had different functions and they changed over time.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will analyze primary sources from 1933-1939 during the early usage of the concentration camp system. Students will learn about the different types of prisoners that suffered in the camps.
Early concentration camps tested what the Nazis could get away with. They were also a place where SS and SA officers could be groomed to act out violently towards prisoners.
Ask students what they know about concentration camps. Do they know when they started? What kind of people were imprisoned in them?
Read through the resource, Early Camps by the BBC with the class. Then go back and demonstrate how to get to the primary sources by clicking on the red lettering in the text and then clicking on “Read Document” that comes up.
Dissect the first resource, “mass arrests” as a class. Use the following guidelines to help go through it:
Divide the class into groups of three or five and assign each group one of the eight other primary sources. Some sources are longer than others, so you may decide you want to have larger groups analyze those. The longer resources are the ones labeled: ‘no mercy’, ‘murders’, ‘left-wing prisoners’, and ‘German Jews’.
Have them repeat what you did as a class in their groups with their assigned resource. Ask each group to present their resource to the class verbally. If possible, project each resource for the class as the group goes over it.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will learn the history of antisemitism and how it was transformed into Nazi racial antisemitism through the years.
Antisemitism was not invented with the rise of the Nazi party. It had deep roots that were transformed to fit the racist ideology of the time.
Begin by prompting your students to think about forms of intolerance. What kind of ‘isms’ can they think of that separate one group from another in a detrimental way?
Do they believe that certain ‘isms’ are more powerful than others? Why might this be?
This lesson can be found in an expanded form here.
Divide students into groups or pairs.
Distribute the first definition card within this three page bundle, which defines the terms ideology, racists and ethnicity.
In groups, pairs, or individually students work to define the yellow highlighted words. After the group defines the word, they use dictionaries to check their definitions.
After 5 minutes come together and have students briefly share:
Pivot toward the question of pseudoscience: Now that we have definitions of racists and race, let’s examine the pseudo science behind beliefs that human behavior is biologically determined. See if they know what pseudo means.
Distribute and read definition cards two and three which defines pseudo, science and racial antisemitism.
–> Students can repeat the definitional activity used with the first definition cards for the second and third cards as well..
Check for understanding of the concept of pseudoscience and racial antisemitism.
Answer questions or clear misconceptions before proceeding.
Watch this short clip from USHMM about racism in the Nazi party. Then ask students to respond to the following questions either in writing or small groups before opening up for a large group discussion. You may also assign certain questions to groups or individuals to reduce the time for responses.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will learn the history of anti-Judaism and its relevance when studying the Holocaust. Open up into a discussion about prejudices in history and how rumors and hatred get carried through generations.
Stereotypes and misinformation of the Jewish people has persisted and changed through the years, with much of it still visible in present day.
Ask students how they define religion. Then, how might they define ‘religious differences’?
Furthermore, can they consider how religious differences have been handled throughout history? Is this a peaceful history or a bloody one?
Divide the class into a maximum of six groups. Have each group elect one person as their recorder. Note that everyone else must read and all members should contribute to the answers.
Direct student to the resource, Anti-Judaism before the Enlightenment by Facing History and Ourselves. Ask students to read through the resource and go over the Connection Questions found at the bottom of the page in their small group. Have groups write down their answers. Give 25 minutes for this exercise.
Come back together as a class and go over the answers to the connection questions. Ask each group to answer one question, selecting them randomly. Tell students they should be adding to their answers with thoughts discussed by the class and answers from other groups.
If time permits, ask students the questions below in an open discussion.
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Students will learn about the pre-genocide expulsion of Jews that took place in 1938. This lesson will open a discussion about refugees, statelessness, and international complicity.
Geopolitical crises are often created by powerful countries, not by powerless people.
Ask students how they define the term citizenship.
Then, ask them how they would define the term refugee. What is the difference between someone who is a citizen, and someone who is a refugee? Is the distinction meaningful in terms of their status as a human being? If not, why are they treated so differently?
Read through the resource, The Expulsion of Polish Jews From Germany by holocaust.cz as a class. Ask students to write down any questions they have about the text.
Divide the class into groups of three and provide them with the following instructions:
Discussion Questions:
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.
Read through an account by survivor Primo Levi on identity in the camps and then take the class through an activity on dehumanization using the Echoes & Reflections Timeline of the Holocaust.
It is easier to commit harsh acts towards someone who is seen as an absolute Other–one whose very existence threatens your own.
Write the term “dehumanization” on the board. As a class, compose a definition. Present and review the definition of dehumanization with students. Students should have a basic understanding of the process of dehumanization.
Dehumanization: As a political or social measure, dehumanization is intended to change the manner in which a person or group of people are perceived, reducing the target group to objects or beings not worthy of human rights.
Direct students to the resource, Identity in the Camps by Facing History and Ourselves. Read the passage by Primo Levi as a class. Explain that Primo Levi is a Holocaust survivor that spent time as a prisoner in Auschwitz concentration camp and has written works about his time there.
According to Primo Levi, what happened to the identities of the prisoners in the camps?
Divide the class into groups of two or three and assign the group a single year, between the years 1933-1945.
Ask students to examine their assigned year using the Timeline of the Holocaust by Echoes & Reflections and find what they believe to be the three most influential events and stories for that year that contributed to the dehumanization of the Jewish people. Identify and be prepared to justify choices.
Have students share the events they identified from their research of the Timeline, and then as a class respond to the following questions:
This lesson meets the following Academic Standards required by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Before you teach, use our teacher primer to freshen up on your content knowledge.