Contextualization
Students will watch a video with testimonies from people that fought as Jewish partisans. This lesson will go over the myth that Jews did not resist, contradict it, and open up a discussion on changing the narrative.
There is a common misconception that Jews did not resist during the Holocaust.
Ask your students what words come to mind when they think of the Holocaust. If you choose to, write them on the board as you go. Does the term “resistance” come up?
Tell students that it is a common myth that Jews went like “sheep to the slaughter” during the Holocaust. Let students know that the people they will hear from in the video were part of the resistance, a group of Jewish partisans that fought against Nazi forces and saved the lives of thousands.
Define a partisan for the class, explaining that a partisan is, “a member of an organized body of fighters who attack or harass an enemy, especially behind enemy lines; a guerrilla.” A group using guerrilla tactics use irregular forms of fighting such as sabotage and hit-and-run attacks.
Play the video, Introduction to the Jewish Partisans, by Facing History and Ourselves. Open up to a class discussion about partisans with the questions below.
Continue the class discussion with the following thoughts. Read through the two statements below to direct the conversation.
What are ways in which we as individuals can help change the narrative?
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 engage with a survivor’s personal story about the aftermath of the war, immigration, and the complexity of re-building home and family.
After everything survivors went through, their attempts to reunite with their families and their desire to rebuild was full of seemingly endless heartbreak, struggles, questions, and challenges.
Explain to the students that the aftermath of WWII and the liberation of people from concentration and death camps was the beginning of a difficult period of recovery for around 6 million refugees and displaced persons. Jewish refugees in particular faced much discrimination by authorities, and had a difficult time re-building their lives.
Split the class into 4 groups, assigning a section of Nate Leipciger’s post-liberation story to each group. Allow each group 15 minutes to read through their assigned text and list out events detailed, as well as specific things that stood out to them in the story, to be presented to the rest of the class.
Allow 5 minutes for each group to present each section of the story in chronological order, beginning with group 1 and ending with group 4.
Use the remaining 10 minutes to discuss with the class the reasons why Nate Leipciger and his father chose to rebuild their lives outside of Poland, as well as what aspects of the story stood out to them. If there is any time remaining, ask the students whether or not knowing the whole story made it difficult to understand what happened. Explain that often families were separated from each other at different points of the war, so that they may know one part of the story but be unaware of others. This made it very difficult to reunite with other members of the family who survived, or to figure out what happened to those who did not.
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.
Introduce students to Martin Niemoller, a Protestant clergy member, who exemplifies the complexities of the history of the Church and its relationship to Nazism.
Religious organizations were often swept up in the pull of Nazism, even when their members might have seen the danger.
Collectively read Martin Niemoller’s famous lines, recorded as a poem “First They Came” available from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Ask students to reflect on the meaning of the poem. What is most striking about it? What message is it sending to its audience?
Place Martin Niemoller in context by watching the video Awakening Conscience from Facing History and Ourselves. Prior to showing the seven-minute video ask your students to take notes on the things they think are most important. What strikes them about the story of Niemoller and the history that surrounds his story?
After the video, ask students to share what they discovered, prompting them to clarify why they felt this information was important.
If missed, ask students what they make of the following issues, in particular and return to these sections of the video if necessary:
Ask students to return to the poem and either ask a student to read it aloud or watch this rendering here.
Given what they now know about Niemoller’s story, ask them to reflect on the lines again in some individual writing. Who is the ‘they’ Niemoller is referring to? What does it mean to ‘speak out’? To whom would Niemoller or any other citizen of Germany ‘speak out’?
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.
Complete an activity having students analyze photographs from the Holocaust with and without context; the photos are from the United States Holocaust Memorial site. Students see the actions of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims in these primary sources.
The Holocaust could not have been possible without the participation of many.
Read this quote by Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg, from “Destruction of the European Jews” to the class. “In retrospect it may be possible to view the entire design as a mosaic of small pieces, each commonplace and lusterless by itself.” (Hilberg, 1885, P. 263)
Ask students, What could have happened if one of these “mosaic pieces” were to refuse an order?
This lesson has been simplified from a lesson created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (full lesson can be found here). Distribute this worksheet and the caption-less photographs to students in groups of three. Explain to them that they will first receive a photograph without any context and that they will be asked to answer the questions as best they can.
Provide each group with a photograph without a caption and a worksheet. There are seven different photographs, depending on the size of the class some groups may be examining the same picture.
Allow students some time to look over the picture and answer the questions in Section 1 of the worksheet. When everyone is finished, hand out the same photograph this time including the caption. After looking over the photograph and caption, ask students to answer the questions in Section 2 of the worksheet.
Have each of the groups share what they learned from their photographs. If possible, project the pictures on a large screen so the entire class can see the picture the group is describing.
How does looking at the pictures after receiving the context change how you feel about the photo?
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.
Explore the preparations made by Hitler as he geared up for war. Read through a secondary source, with excerpts from some primary sources, in order to get an understanding of how these actions were viewed. Explained as defensive measures, Hitler began increasing the military, reconstructing the German air force, and taking back the Rhineland.
Hitler openly defied restrictions set forth in the Treaty of Versailles with seemingly no repercussions.
Ask students who the initial aggressor was in WWII?
Given that it was Germany, and given that Germany was not supposed to be capable of war, how did they become the aggressor?
Tell students that they will be reading about the initial actions taken by Hitler that would ultimately drive Germany toward war. Note that they will also be exploring how these illegal actions were perceived by people at the time.
Direct students to the source, Battle for Work, which is an excerpt from Facing History and Ourselves. Have them read through the document individually first, taking note of sections, words or ideas that they didn’t understand clearly. Give students about 10 minutes to read this text.
Then, divide the class into five groups. Start them on the path toward understanding by having them attempt to answer one another’s questions about the text.
Ask the large group whether they think Hitler’s jobs program might have been attractive to Germans, amidst a depression and in the wake of the defeat of WWI. Then, ask each person to read, Rearming Germany by Facing History and Ourselves.
In the same small groups, have students discuss the questions available on the ‘Rearming Germany’ page. For the first fifteen minutes, ask each group to talk through each question and discuss what they think about each. Then, assign one question to each group and ask them to quickly prepare a short response to their question to kick off the broader, full class discussion about that question.
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.
Discover the unifying themes of antisemitism by exploring artifacts and events that demonstrate the fear and anger that fuels this long standing conspiracy theory and its hatred towards the Jewish people.
Antisemitism is a dangerous conspiracy theory with consistent elements.
As your students if they have ever heard of a conspiracy theory. What is a conspiracy theory? What are the ones that fascinate them the most?
Provide the definition of conspiracy theory: “a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event.”
Provide your students with insights from Dr. Deborah Lipstadt (available in full here), who suggests that antisemitism “is rooted in a conspiracy theory. As such, the Jew is not just to be loathed but is to be feared.” Ask your students, “Why do conspiracy theories evoke fear?”
Furthermore, Dr. Lipstadt suggests that the conspiracy theory of antisemitism “has a structure. It is not just a haphazard conglomeration of sentiments. It generally has three to four essential elements: wealth, cunning (smarts used nefariously), and power beyond their ‘legitimate number’ (punching above their weight).”
Their task of this lesson is to identify these essential elements within specific examples and then report their findings to the whole class.
Split students into five groups.
Each group will examine one of the five examples of antisemitism shown in Antisemitism Over Time from Echoes and Reflections. Distribute one example per group.
Then, provide the following instructions:
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.
Explore a summary of contemporary antisemitism, spanning the history between World War II and today.
Antisemitism is an ongoing issue throughout the world.
Ask your students if they have heard the term antisemitism before. If they have, how do they understand it? Guide discussion toward the definition from the Anti-Defamation League to set the stage for the rest of the lesson.
Turn toward the reading about Contemporary Antisemitism from Echoes & Reflections. Begin by reading the first section aloud as a class, answering any questions or defining words about which the students require clarification.
Then, divide the class into two groups.
Have every student read their section individually. Then pair with another member of their group to clarify the main points, questions, and challenges.
Finally, ask group 1 pairs to partner with group 2 pairs.
Have each pair share their summary of the section they read. What were the most important parts, what questions do they have, what is their understanding of the historical era being addressed?
Then, ask the quartet to answer the following set of 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.