Thompson Middle and Columbiana Middle School  

Richard and Karen at the Terezin Memorial site outside Prague.

"We Shall Never Forget." Our Journey Through the Holocaust --Project Summary:
When we teach our children about The Holocaust, we often find that names, numbers, and places don’t go far enough toward helping them go beyond the surface and understand “the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.” (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Fund For Teachers allowed us to immerse ourselves in those names, numbers, and places throughout Europe to gain a deeper understanding of the realities of the worst atrocity in the history of mankind. 
Our students often ask, “How could this have happened?” Our visits to Munich and Nuremberg and Salzburg helped us understand the origins of the Nazi party and Adolph Hitler’s rise to power.
Our visits to Amsterdam and Haarlem in The Netherlands showed us how two very different people, a Jewish teenager named Anne Frank and a Christian woman named Corrie ten Boom, dealt with German occupation and the persecution and deportation of Jewish people. 
Our visits to Prague, Krakow, and Budapest revealed how the Nazis stripped the Jews of their legal rights and forced them from their homes into overpopulated ghettos.
Our visits to two concentration camps, Dachau and Terezin, taught us how the Nazis imprisoned people in squalid conditions of starvation, disease, and torture.
Finally, our visit to Auschwitz led us to a place that, in reality, became a killing factory where approximately 1.3 people were murdered, many of them in mass executions in gas chambers.

 

Blog:  Connecting the Holocaust

Resources for Teaching the Holocaust from Karen and Richard's Blog  

Holocaust Teaching Resources for ACTE conference

Last modified: Thursday, July 24, 2014, 3:39 PM