Holocaust Study
Miss C and I just returned from another excellent presentation by Living Voices (see my earlier post about it), this one called "Through the Eyes of a Friend: Share the World of Anne Frank."
It was an incredibly moving presentation. It consisted of an actress dressed similarly to the way Anne Frank is pictured in her book and elsewhere, along with Nazi video footage of the concentration camps where she stayed, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In the manner of a Ken Burns documentary, it also incorporated still photos of the Frank family in the days before they went into hiding. The actress played the role of a composite of Anne's friends, especially one who was also at Bergen-Belsen. Miss C handled it well, while I spent much of the presentation wiping away tears.
We've been studying the Holocaust off and on for several months. There was our moving visit to the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Dedicated in 2003, it's right on the Freedom Trail, very appropriately.
[Above: the glass towers of the New England Holocaust Memorial each represent one of the Nazi concentration camps where Jews were held, and murdered. See my other photos with captions.]
Miss C also read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, Art Spigelman's Maus, and Jennifer Roy's Yellow Star. [Addition: I forgot about reading portions of Mein Kampf; see "Documenting Study."] Together we watched Roberto Benigni's incredible, Oscar-winning story of a Jewish family during the Holocaust, Life is Beautiful. No dry eyes after that one.
Last week, as part of a series of events arranged by a homeschool mom on the topic, we heard talks by two survivors of the Holocaust. One man was 3 when his family was taken, and he was separated from his parents. His non-Jewish nanny kept him and hid his identity for 3 years. His father died in a camp; his mother and grandmother survived and they were reunited after the war. It then took the family 8 years to gain entrance to America, due to the restrictive quotas.
Miss C's great uncle, Abba Schwartz, was an immigration lawyer working to get families like that into the U.S. after the war. It is really outrageous that so few European Jews were allowed into our country -- before, during, and after the war. It is part of Miss C's heritage to know and understand this. It should be the responsibility of all Americans to know it. In fact, we learned that in New Jersey, as in many states, a certain amount of Holocaust education is required in K-12 schools, the only way to prevent something like that from happening again. And as one of the survivors said, It is happening, in Darfur, and elsewhere.
The Living Voices presentation today was especially excellent, because it begins after the Frank family is discovered hiding in the attic, and covers the last 7 months of Anne Frank's life. In her diary, it is chilling when there are no more entries, because she has been discovered and taken, but it's even more chilling to see actual footage of life in those camps. No movie could show people with arms and legs that thin.
Despite the horror of the subject, I feel that Miss C was ready to handle this information. She had been wanting to read Anne Frank's diary for about 3 years, but I had asked her to wait a while, until I felt she could handle it. She was ready for it now. She said, "I think it is horrible that there are people who deny that this ever happened. I needed to know about this and everybody needs to know about it."
As a New England Holocaust Memorial plaque says, "The memory of the Holocaust is the legacy and responsibility of all Humanity."
It was an incredibly moving presentation. It consisted of an actress dressed similarly to the way Anne Frank is pictured in her book and elsewhere, along with Nazi video footage of the concentration camps where she stayed, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In the manner of a Ken Burns documentary, it also incorporated still photos of the Frank family in the days before they went into hiding. The actress played the role of a composite of Anne's friends, especially one who was also at Bergen-Belsen. Miss C handled it well, while I spent much of the presentation wiping away tears.
We've been studying the Holocaust off and on for several months. There was our moving visit to the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Dedicated in 2003, it's right on the Freedom Trail, very appropriately.
[Above: the glass towers of the New England Holocaust Memorial each represent one of the Nazi concentration camps where Jews were held, and murdered. See my other photos with captions.]
Miss C also read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Lois Lowry's Number the Stars, Art Spigelman's Maus, and Jennifer Roy's Yellow Star. [Addition: I forgot about reading portions of Mein Kampf; see "Documenting Study."] Together we watched Roberto Benigni's incredible, Oscar-winning story of a Jewish family during the Holocaust, Life is Beautiful. No dry eyes after that one.
Last week, as part of a series of events arranged by a homeschool mom on the topic, we heard talks by two survivors of the Holocaust. One man was 3 when his family was taken, and he was separated from his parents. His non-Jewish nanny kept him and hid his identity for 3 years. His father died in a camp; his mother and grandmother survived and they were reunited after the war. It then took the family 8 years to gain entrance to America, due to the restrictive quotas.
Miss C's great uncle, Abba Schwartz, was an immigration lawyer working to get families like that into the U.S. after the war. It is really outrageous that so few European Jews were allowed into our country -- before, during, and after the war. It is part of Miss C's heritage to know and understand this. It should be the responsibility of all Americans to know it. In fact, we learned that in New Jersey, as in many states, a certain amount of Holocaust education is required in K-12 schools, the only way to prevent something like that from happening again. And as one of the survivors said, It is happening, in Darfur, and elsewhere.
The Living Voices presentation today was especially excellent, because it begins after the Frank family is discovered hiding in the attic, and covers the last 7 months of Anne Frank's life. In her diary, it is chilling when there are no more entries, because she has been discovered and taken, but it's even more chilling to see actual footage of life in those camps. No movie could show people with arms and legs that thin.
Despite the horror of the subject, I feel that Miss C was ready to handle this information. She had been wanting to read Anne Frank's diary for about 3 years, but I had asked her to wait a while, until I felt she could handle it. She was ready for it now. She said, "I think it is horrible that there are people who deny that this ever happened. I needed to know about this and everybody needs to know about it."
As a New England Holocaust Memorial plaque says, "The memory of the Holocaust is the legacy and responsibility of all Humanity."
Labels: holocaust study
posted by Jennifer Dees at 10:07 AM
I also enjoy sharing resources and ideas for gifted homeschooling with others, and to describe the learning experiences I have with my daughter, Miss C (for "Creative”). This blog is not comprehensive. Instead, like our homeschooling style, it follows our interests. I hope it is useful to others.
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High schoolers and their teachers will be interested in The Freedom Writers, the movie. It was based on the experiences of Erin Gruwell, a new, young, idealistic English teacher, and her students, who were living in urban ghettoes. Her attempts at reaching them were not effective until a student drew and passed around an insulting caricature of another student. She was outraged, telling her students that the Holocaust was an end product of this kind of degrading stereotyping. Their blank looks caused her to ask whether they knew about the Holocaust; not one had heard of it.
This incident informed and inspired her efforts to help them see how their own racism and gang wars were causing them more damage than any outside force. Despite their resistance, she induced them to read The Diary of Anne Frank. The students eventually became so caught up in her story that they sponsored a visit of Mrs. Miep Gies, the hero who had hidden the Frank family, to their school.
At Ms. Gruwell ‘s insistence, all students wrote their own diaries. Many of these were later edited by students for inclusion in their collection, The Freedom Writers Diary, published by Broadway Books, an imprint of Doubleday.
Her followup book,Teach with Your Heart, is subtitled, Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers. Her book tours always included students, whose stories often brought tears to members of the audience. She tells about the trip that fifty of her first group of students made to Europe. They visited Auschwitz and saw the house where the Frank family was hidden.
She ended her book with the premiere of the documentary, The Freedom Writers, now in theaters.
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