The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: Personalizing History

Video Overview

Christina Chavarria, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)'s Education Division, introduces teachers to the museum. She highlights the importance of using individual stories and specific artifacts to make history live for students.

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holocausttour1.mov
holocausttour2.mov
holocausttour3.mov
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Video Clip Title
Introducing the Museum
Race and Eugenics
Obstacles to Flight
Teaching with Artifacts
Video Clip Duration
5:25
3:48
2:28
4:03
Transcript Text

Christina Chavarria: So just kind of look around. What feeling is evoked? Is there anything that might remind you of something? Or maybe nothing at all. Visitor 1: We were just taking [about] the stairs. Almost as if you can be kind of spread out, and then as you go up closer you have to bunch together to file in. I've never seen stairs that do that, it's weird. Christina Chavarria: Okay, that's true. And when you mention that I think of also the train tracks and how they're kind of elongated and they fade and they seem to become more narrow the further away they become. Anybody else have any thoughts about the architecture, the building? Visitor 2: I think it's overwhelming. It makes you feel small. Christina Chavarria: That's very true. That's a very good point. Because, like I said, going back to the importance of the individual in this history, one of the things that we do with teachers is that we really encourage that you translate statistics into people, that instead of focusing solely on the millions of victims or the thousands who may have died in one place, you take those individual stories and you pull them out using primary resources. Christina Chavarria: What the purpose of these cards do, especially in a teaching standpoint, is, again, they focus on the individual. How many of you have somebody who is not Jewish? Anybody have somebody who is not Jewish? Okay, who? Visitor 3: I have Lucian Belie Brunell. He's born to Catholic parents, he's a priest. Christina Chavarria: Okay, we have a priest. Anybody else have somebody who is not Jewish, somebody who is Roma? Disabled? Okay, how about does somebody have—how many of you have somebody from Poland? Germany? Austria? Italy? France? Denmark? The Netherlands? Greece? Yugoslavia? Okay, any other place that I did not mention? Visitor 4: Romania. Visitor 5: Lithuania. Visitor 6: Hungary. Visitor 7: Czechoslovakia. Christina Chavarria: So another purpose of these is for us to see the range of geography. That this did not happen solely in Germany, even though it began there. This did not happen only in Poland. That it spread geographically. It spread all the way into Northern Africa and other parts of the world were impacted, even if they were not occupied by Nazi Germany. Christina Chavarria: Look at the monitor. TV Documentary: "—called in by radio, said that we have come across something and we're not sure what it is. It's a big prison of some kind, and there are people running all over—sick, dying, starved people. You can't imagine it, things like that don't happen." Christina Chavarria: So as we go through, as I mentioned downstairs, I'm not going to point out everything to you, but there are certain elements that I want to point out because we will talk about them in the afternoon. This, in particular, I think is very striking for us as teachers, as social studies teachers, as teachers in the United States. You notice at the top it says, "Americans encounter the camp." We don't use the word in this picture—we don't use the word "liberation." Why not? You couldn't just walk out and go home, first of all. And liberation has that connotation of being free, and yet the obstacles that lay ahead for those who did survive will be so vast—the obstacles, the challenges, for the Allied forces and relief workers who come into the camps. So, we chose that word "encounter." And this was not, as we know now, this was not the first that we knew of the camps. It was the first maybe that we had seen of the camps with our own eyes, but we will see that. When you look at this history again we define it the years 1933–1945. Christina Chavarria: Where you all came in, we call that the Eisenhower Plaza. This quote up here that's on the side of the building, of the museum structure. Because if you look at it, I think this is an excellent quote to use with students because it takes us back to that theme of anti-Semitism and that theme today of Holocaust denial.

Christina Chavarria: I think as teachers here in the United States, the issue of race science, which was very popular in the United States, it was not only in Nazi Germany. If you look at your own states—if each individual state looks at its history—you can look and see the laws that were on the books regarding sterilization, regarding who could marry whom. So, again, looking at U.S. history, especially in the latter part of the 19th century and the eugenics movement and how this became so popular. And the whole notion of race, the definition of race, and categorizing people. This is very, very relevant. Christina Chavarria: What are the questions that your students ask when you're teaching this? How many of you have taught about the Holocaust? Visitor 1: They want to know why; they want to know how could this have started? They want to know, you know, why is Hitler so anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic? They want to know the root of it all. Visitor 2: They want to know, too, why they willingly were prisoners. You know, 7th grade, why, I would have not done this— Christina Chavarria: I would have fought back, right? And they did, that's a very good issue to bring up. They did, and we have to teach about resistance. One of the questions related to that is: Why didn’t they just leave? Why didn't they just pack up and go somewhere else? Well, again, the complexities of this history—don't avoid those questions when they ask you. Why didn't, why couldn't they just pack up and leave? We look at the Évian Conference, which is where we look at the failure of other nations to respond to the growing crisis in Europe. And this symbolizes that, this political cartoon. This appeared in the New York Times, July 3, 1938, just before the Évian Conference was to begin. So we can take this image and we can deconstruct this, and what do we see happening here? Visitor 3: The guy's at a stop sign with no place to go. Christina Chavarria: The stop sign is on what? Multiple Visitors: A swastika. Christina Chavarria: Every point, every direction ends with that halt—you can't, you can't go. And who is this person? Visitor 4: Non-Aryan. Christina Chavarria: Non-Aryan, presumably Jewish—the kippah. And what's on the horizon? The Évian Conference invited nations to attend to discuss the growing refugee problem. So 32 countries send representatives to this conference, but, yet, they're also told we're not going to ask you to take any more people in. So the conference was basically a failure before it even began because only one country stepped forward and said, "We're willing to take in more refugees than what we have on our quotas, listed as our quotas." Does anybody know what that country was, what that one country was? It's right down here. The Dominican Republic. This also revealed a lot of anti-Semitic thought from leaders of other nations. Some countries said, "We don't have a Jewish problem and we don't want to import one." Some said, "We're going through our own issues." And that's very true, because we've got to contextualize this from what happened in the 1920s, what happened in 1929, the economic—the Depression as well. But, yet, we also have to factor in anti-Semitic sentiments because who are these refugees? Well, they're mostly Jewish, they might take our jobs, they might take—we don't have money to support them.

Christina Chavarria: Looking at the whole idea of refuge, and the search for refuge, where do you go when nations have closed their doors to you? Where do you go? What kind of documentation do you need to get out of Germany? What documents do you need? What kind of money do you need to emigrate? These are all issues that you have to bring up with your students so that they understand why they were trapped in Europe. Christina Chavarria: This chart that we see here, this is the forced immigration chart that Adolf Eichmann's office produced to show how it was able to expel, within three years, most of Vienna's Jewish population. After the Anschluss, after Kristallnacht, this is when Jews in the occupied territories—Germany, Austria, parts of Czechoslovak—after Kristallnacht, they realized that they can no longer stay. Life is just not bearable any more; in fact it's dangerous now. In many cases, many of them actually bought visas to get out. Some countries made money, some diplomats made money selling fraudulent visas that turned out to be no good. And that is what happened with the voyage of the St. Louis. Out of the 937 passengers who were on the boat, almost—I think all but maybe six to eight of them were Jewish. They needed to get out, and Cuba was the destination of this ship, the St. Louis. It was owned by the Hamburg line, Hamburg America. They had acquired visas to go to Cuba, where they were planning to stay until their numbers came up to come to the United States. But before they reached Cuba, their visas were rescinded; in fact, many of them were fraudulent, only about 28 of them were actually valid. So when they got to Havana, they were not allowed to dock. Only those who had valid visas, which was just a miniscule number out of the over 900 those people were allowed to stay, and the rest could not get off the boat.

Christina Chavarria: Here you see newspapers from some of the major cities across the country reporting on the front page certain events that were taking place in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. Right here, for example, the Dallas Morning News: Kristallnacht, November 1938, front page. This was not a secret. Christina Chavarria: This is called "The Tower of Faces." This is one thing I want to point out to you because—just take a couple minutes to look around at the pictures. This represents one shtetl, one Jewish community, in Lithuania. The little girl right here is Professor Yaffa Eliach, she lives in New York. She went back to this shtetl, Eishyshok, and she gathered the 10,000 photos, many of which you see here, and which we have online. Again, what this does, we look at the individual; we look at the victim not as a "victim," but as a vibrant human being. I think anything we teach, whether it's the Holocaust or any other topic that we're looking at in history, we have to look at the individuals. Christina Chavarria: This milk can is one of three milk cans that was used to bury documents and chronicles of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. And in 1950, two of the milk cans were excavated as well as the other metal boxes. Within them they found a very rich documentation of what life in the ghetto was like. Christina Chavarria: Actual barracks that are on loan to us from Poland, they are not replicas. Right over here we have a large-scale model of the process of going through the selection, going to the gas chambers, because we don't have any photos of the actual gassing, of course. Christina Chavarria: The diary, the quote, and the armband, take a look at that. The diary is the first diary that was donated to us by an American in captivity. Most of the diaries that we see they were written when they were in hiding or before they had to leave, but he was able to keep his diary while he was in the camp. It's also striking because Anthony Acevedo—he's not Jewish, in fact he's the son of Mexican immigrants. He is—we consider him to be a survivor, because of the fact that he went through a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Christina Chavarria: This is one of over a thousand citizenship papers that was found in somebody's attic in Switzerland. In a suitcase were these documents, these citizenship papers, issued by El Salvador that stated that the individuals who were named in the documents, whose pictures appeared on the documents were citizens of El Salvador, when in reality they were not—most of them were Hungarian Jews. This is 1944, Hungary is invaded in the spring of 1944 by Germany, and out of about 500,000 Hungarian Jews, over 430,000 died at Auschwitz in a very short period of time.

IWitness

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Film still, Ellis Lewin, 4 December 1996, IWitness
Annotation

IWitness is an incredible resource for educators intent on bringing awareness and analysis of the Holocaust to their classroom. The site offers more than 1,000 video testimony clips from Holocaust survivors, liberators, and others. These videos can be browsed by topic (from "Anti-Jewish Laws" to "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising") or searched by name or topic. Searching provides a few benefits for lesson planning. For one, video search results will play the portion of a clip containing information related to your search, making it easy to decide if the result is actually relevant to your classroom plans. In addition, searches may reveal related materials such as photographs of artifacts in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum collection or encyclopedia articles providing additional information and context.

You can also register as an educator or a student. Educators can assign activities and view student work (only viewable by the specific student and the teacher). Students can watch videos on items such as understanding testimony and archives or editing video interviews in an ethical manner. Activities that call for video editing allow students to save clips into a library for future use in their projects and prepare their own videos using video-editing tools which are part of the website—no download needed.

For a quick introduction to the site, consider watching the six-minute demonstration video linked at the top of the About Us page.

Interested in learning more about IWitness? Read teacher Brandon Haas's Tech for Teachers article.

Artifacts and Objects
Personal Accounts
Photographs
Holocaust
oral history
Images
Text
Video
Days of Remembrance
Splash Pullout Days of Remembrance
Learn Days of Remembrance
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Ethnicity
Ideas & Ideologies
International Relations
Military History

The Role of the Artifact in Teaching about the Holocaust

Article Body

While the Holocaust bears the distinction of being the most documented genocide, it also bears the weight of incomprehension. Oftentimes, this leads to pedagogical approaches that, though well-intentioned, distort or trivialize history. To better understand the factors that led to the persecution and murder of European Jews and millions of non-Jews, how do intentional encounters with seemingly ordinary artifacts—in the exhibition space of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and through its online resources—promote historical thinking for understanding the Holocaust's profundity?

First, artifacts facilitate translating the statistical millions into individuals.

First, artifacts facilitate translating the statistical millions into individuals. (1) This in turn demonstrates how chronology, geography, and circumstance led to persecution, murder, or survival for the mosaic of victims. When used as a sustained classroom teaching tool, the identity cards visitors receive when entering the Permanent Exhibition illustrate these factors. (Over 500 are now available on the Museum's website.)

For example, the identity card of Gad Beck reveals that as a Mischlinge—the child of a German Gentile mother and Jewish father—Beck was spared deportation to the killing centers in Eastern Europe. While many homosexuals lived in fear, and thousands were persecuted and murdered, being part of the homosexual community aided Beck’s survival. He turned to trusted non-Jewish homosexual friends to provide food and hiding places.

Beck's card also calls for inquiry into the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. Under these laws, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was considered to be Jewish, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. The card details his betrayal by a Jewish spy for the Gestapo near the end of the war in 1945. The year bears examination, for if his betrayal had occurred prior to 1945, this would have severely limited his chance to survive.

Second, artifact contemplation helps to contextualize the Holocaust beyond the brutality of mass murder.

Second, artifact contemplation helps to contextualize the Holocaust beyond the brutality of mass murder. On the Museum's third floor, visitors encounter a mass assortment of victims' shoes from the Majdanek killing center near Lublin, Poland. The shoes signify the systematic plunder of victims' belongings in the dehumanization process of the Holocaust. Students visiting the shoe exhibit notice the deterioration of the shoes, but they may also notice the variety of styles and realize that for many victims, the shoes may be the only personal items that survive them. The shoes remind students of the personal stories behind the artifact.

Next to the shoes, the Tower of Faces displays photographs of shtetl life in Eishyshok, now in Lithuania. These photos, available on the Museum's online archive, portray a vibrant Jewish community that existed for 900 years. In 1941, an SS mobile killing squad entered the village and in two days murdered the Jewish population. The photos speak not to the killing, but to the culture and inhabitants of Eastern European shtetl life before the war while ensuring that the victims not remain faceless or forgotten.

Third, analyzing artifacts of Holocaust history helps avoid giving simple answers to complex questions

Third, analyzing artifacts of Holocaust history helps avoid giving simple answers to complex questions. The voyage of the St. Louis, displayed on the Museum's fourth floor and in an online exhibition, frames the often-asked question, "Why didn't they just leave?" as a conduit to understanding how U.S. immigration quotas established in the 1920s prevented significant Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 1940s.

Examining the photo album of a St. Louis passenger increases students' understanding of the individuals who were impacted by the "push-pull-push back" factors of emigration and immigration. The album's photos depict passengers dancing and dining, roller-skating and sunning themselves on the ship's deck, blissfully unaware that they will soon be denied entry to Cuba and the U.S. Realizing that their lives were in peril if they remained in Europe, their fates were determined by factors beyond their control. The photo album prompts students to look at the social, diplomatic, political, and often anti-Semitic tone in the U.S. before and during the war. The St. Louis photo album provokes scrutiny of U.S. foreign policy then and now, and perhaps more importantly, the photo album conveys that history is not inevitable but is shaped by decision-making at all levels.

Analysis of the Museum's rich trove of artifacts can move the Holocaust from the abstract to the tangible. As the witness generation passes away, Holocaust education will rely increasingly on evidence from the era. Through contemplation of artifacts and other documents, studying the Holocaust will remain dynamic well into the 21st century.

Note: The views expressed are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

Footnotes
1 The three methodologies the author outlines are based on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust.
Teaser

Artifacts help translate the statistical millions into individuals and avoid giving simple answers to complex questions.

Preparing for the Days of Remembrance

Date Published
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Photo, prisoners numbers at the Holocaust Memorial, Boston, Highsmith, LoC
Article Body

Established through an Executive Order signed by President Jimmy Carter, the annual Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust ask U.S. citizens to remember the tragedy of the Holocaust—the murder of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. This year, the Days of Remembrance stretch from April 15 to April 22, with April 19 identified as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

How can you teach the Days of Remembrance in secondary classrooms? Some students may feel that the Holocaust happened long ago on another continent, a distant event that has little to do with their lives today. Teaching the Days of Remembrance and the Holocaust offers the chance to think about global connections, individual and group responsibility, the fragile nature of democracies, and the importance of individual vigilance and action.

How do people talk about and understand the Holocaust today in the U.S. and around the world?

What impact did the Holocaust have on the U.S.? When did the U.S. learn about it? How did the government respond? How did individuals respond? Who were the people who carried out the Holocaust? As a group? As individuals? Why did they carry out the Holocaust? Who were the individuals, institutions, and nations who helped the victims, often at the risk of their own lives?

How do people talk about and understand the Holocaust today in the U.S. and around the world? There are hundreds of difficult but rewarding questions you can explore with your students, sharpening their historical thinking skills and challenging them to consider the place of ethics and personal decisions in the past and the present.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum can help introduce students to these questions. Every year, the museum chooses a theme for the Days of Remembrance. This year, the theme is "Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue," focusing on the stories of those who risked their lives to help protect Jews from persecution, imprisonment, and death. Learn more about the theme (and request CDs and DVDs of free resources) at the museum's website.

Explore the website further to uncover:

The museum also maintains online exhibits, including:

More Resources

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is one of many institutions offering materials on the Holocaust. For more resources, visit our Days of Remembrance spotlight page. The page also features materials on Jewish American history.

TAH Projects and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Video Overview

Christina Chavarria of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the many resources the museum can offer TAH Grant projects and her own perceptions on the value of the TAH Grant program.

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Transcript Text

During the course of the time that I've been at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, we've had quite a few calls from TAH grant directors who are bringing teachers to Washington who would like a tour of the museum, and sometimes they might ask for a short professional development session.

So this really piqued our curiosity and we began to think of how we could work more intentionally with the TAH program, and it led us to really look at our resources and how our resources support American history, because even though the Holocaust took place in Europe, it is also very much a story about the United States and American responses and how those responses inform a lot of what we're teaching in schools today and issues that we're dealing with here in the United States.

We ask what the theme of the grant is and if there's any particular focus that they are looking at within the grant. For example, we had one TAH project director telling us about the focus on President Roosevelt. So we worked with our historians, our Senior Historians Office; we also work with collections, to see what collections we have that support American history, and we also look at using our permanent exhibition because our permanent exhibition does have a focus on the United States and the role of the United States.

So we try to put in time, of course, for the teachers to see the exhibit, that's very important. and a session on how to teach about the Holocaust and if there is a direct focus within the grant, we can look at our senior historians office to support a lecture about some historical topic that's related to the grant.

We also encourage teachers to hear Holocaust survivors, their testimonies. We do have Holocaust survivors who are at the museum every day. And if we have a phone call and if the project directors make contact with us early on, we can arrange to have Holocaust survivors speak, and that's very important, because we are losing that generation. So while we still have our survivors with us we do encourage teachers and the project directors to incorporate Holocaust testimony in the visit.

The standards in the United States for teaching U.S. history are either very explicit on teaching the Holocaust, where they state responses to what was happening in Nazi Germany and what was happening in occupied Europe during that time—those are very explicitly stated in many states. But when you look at other themes, American response, foreign policy respond, the rise of fascism, American responses to fascism—if you look at American responses to dictatorships, all of these strands within the elements and standards are very much a part of what we focus on at the museum. It's a very natural fit.

Pretty much everything you will see at the United States Holocaust Museum fits in perfectly to support U.S. history teachers when you're looking at 20th-century history. And even the precedents that were set before. You can look at the 19th century, you can look at the role of antisemitism. There are so many elements. And then of course, today, focusing on our responses to genocides since the Holocaust—that is an incredibly important topic to our museum. And, so, we would encourage U.S. history teachers to look at American foreign policy in trouble spots in places like Darfur, in the former Yugoslavia, like Rwanda, and how we've responded to those situations, and how the Holocaust gave us this, I don't want to say opportunity, but it gave us this light on the subject that is still very much with us today.

Because our primary focus is on the victims and our survivors and their testimonies, but, for example, in working with a Teaching American History group a few weeks ago, I focused on some interviews with an African American athlete, John Will—John Woodruff, excuse me, who was a participant in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and he speaks very eloquently about his experiences in Berlin in 1936, representing the United States and being proud to represent his country and his race and what he saw there and the euphoria of the crowds in reaction to his gold medal victory—also Jesse Owens, which is a story that many people know very well. And then when he returns home, he speaks about being excluded from the hall of fame, from the university where he, that he attended.

In looking at that, to show again what we do in a professional development is to show how expansive this history really is. And we use survivor testimony, we use witness testimony, we use liberator testimony. we also focus very much on photos and other primary source documents. And what we really want to do is to complicate the thinking of the teachers that come to us for professional development, to show that this history is so complex and so vast in its context from the years that it took place, but what happened in the years before, the decades and centuries before, and what's happening after.

June and July are very, very busy months for us and usually we're booked about a year before in our schedules, so I recommend to project directors that they contact us, perhaps in the fall, but as soon as they know that they want to come, they need to be in touch with us, and we will do our absolute best to get them in the museum—because that's very important and if there's time and if there's space and we're available to do so we would be very happy to provide professional development to them, as well.

And for groups that they cannot come to Washington, DC, we offer many resources offsite. First of all, our website is filled with archival material—our photo archives, for example. We also have exemplary lessons that have been tested by teachers and education experts, and they have been vetted for historical accuracy. We also have online exhibitions that contain collections that we encourage teachers to use for a more hands-on approach. More importantly, we have traveling exhibitions, and on our website, you can see a schedule of what exhibitions will be in certain venues around the country and when.

And from our standpoint, from the educational standpoint, we have a network of museum regional educators, our Regional Education Corps, and these are 30 educators who are deeply involved with our museum who are spread out around the country, and if you contact us in the Education Division, in the National Outreach for Teacher Initiatives branch, we can be in touch with our museum regional educators and they can work with a TAH project anywhere in the country to provide professional development even before a group comes to the museum, or after, or if they never come at all—we still have that on-ground support. We also have 246 museum Teacher Fellows around the country, one in each of the 50 states, and they are also resources whom we turn to to provide professional development in places where we're not able to go.

The value of Teaching American History is that it works so closely with a group of teachers and it provides sustainability, and sustainability in the career of a teacher is incredibly important. Sometimes you feel like you're alone as a teacher in your classroom, and when you have that network of support and it's ongoing and it's centered on a theme and a particular rational, that makes a teacher feel incredibly rewarded for having that experience, but more importantly that translates into student success.

And students will only benefit from a teacher having that kind of quality interaction with professionals around a sustained program that will keep them going. The network and the broad availability of resources in the form of other teachers and other grants and what is available online is astounding, and I hope that it continues, and I encourage teachers and educators throughout the country to look at this program, because it does sustain teachers, and if you sustain the teacher, the teacher can better sustain the student, so that that translates into success in the classroom for the student.

Why We Remember the Holocaust

Description

This short video produced by the The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the events of the Holocaust in the words of both survivors and modern scholars. The video also discusses the importance of commemorating those consumed by this horrific tragedy and the reason for the National Days of Remembrance. In the words of Holocaust Survivor Estelle Laughlin, "[It's] not enough to curse the darkness of the past. Above all, we have to illuminate the future," for only by doing so can we "leave the world better for our children and for posterity."

The Final Solution

Description

This animated presentation from The Map as History follows the escalation of Germany's persecution and execution of Jews during World War II as it spread across Germany's European conquests. The locations of each ghetto, prison and execution camp, and deportation route are marked as they are discussed.

Teaching About the Holocaust

Description

This online workshop includes video segments from a workshop presented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in February 2001 in Baltimore, MD. The guidelines and methodological suggestions in these video segments—including suggested lesson plans and 14 points to consider in teaching the Holocaust—are at the core of every teacher workshop and conference presented by the Museum. In addition to video of the actual workshop session, segments include historical and artifact photographs, text, and links to related sites within the Museum's website.

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