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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.

Video Clip Name

holocausttour1.mov

holocausttour2.mov

holocausttour3.mov

holocausttour4.mov

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.

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Coming of Age in the Twentieth Century, Stories from Minnesota and Beyond

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Photo, Donna, Age 13, c. 1966, Twentieth-Century Girls

Annotation

This website explores "girls' history" with 40 oral history interviews conducted by women's studies students at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Each interviewee was asked extensively about her girlhood. Questions focused on adolescence and growing up as well as the social, cultural, and physical implications of girlhood and personal experiences. Topics include family, race, sexuality, education, and women's issues. The archive includes brief biographies, video clips, and transcripts of interviews (arranged thematically), photographs, and reflections of the interview process. Most of the women interviewed were born and raised in Minnesota, although a few came from other states with a smaller number immigrating from other countries. The site is not searchable, and the video clips are not high quality.

Women's History Month

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Newspapers and Periodicals

Popular Culture, Leisure

Rural Life

Sexuality

Women

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The Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project jmccartney Thu, 09/10/2009 - 07:51

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Photo, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History and Industry

Annotation

Internment experiences of Americans and Canadians of Japanese heritage in the Northwest during World War II are documented in this site, which features an exhibit that "tells the story of Seattle's Japanese American community in the spring and summer of 1942 and their four month sojourn at the Puyallup Assembly Center known as 'Camp Harmony.'" The internment camp section furnishes nearly 150 primary documents--including 12 issues of the "Camp Harmony Newsletter," 16 government documents, ten letters, 39 photographs, 24 drawings, a scrapbook, 20 newspaper clippings, and a 7,500-word chapter from the book Nisei Daughter that describes camp life. The site also provides archival guides and inventories for 21 University of Washington Library manuscript holdings relating to the internment and for 21 related collections; a 46-title bibliography for further reading; and additional information and documents related to Japanese Canadian internment. Valuable for those studying the wartime experiences and culture of interned Japanese Americans.

Literary Sources

Official Documents

Images

Text

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

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VOCES Oral History Project aharmon Wed, 01/18/2012 - 16:40

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Photo, Albert Jose Angel, VOCES Oral History Project

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VOCES (Spanish for "voices") began as the project of a University of Texas professor of journalism. Rivas-Rodriguez sought to record the stories of Latinas and Latinos who served during World War II. However, since 2010 the archives have expanded in scope, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to also include experiences from the Korean War and Vietnam War.

The majority of the interviews found on the site focus on veterans. However, civilian experiences are included as well. The "Stories" section can be browsed by name, war, city of birth, state of birth, and branch of service. A rather easy to overlook bar at the bottom of the page also permits you to find stories based on thematic content such as "citizenship" and "racism/discrimination." Each individual name is connected to a short narrative based on the individual's interview. These include direct quotations from the man or woman in question, but there is no transcript of the entire interview itself. You may also find photographs accompanying each story.

Maybe you would like your students to conduct similar interviews, particularly if no names are available from your home town. If so, be sure to visit "Learn to Interview." Here you can find a series of short videos describing the process of preparing for, conducting, and processing oral interviews. If you would like to provide an interview for the site, a downloadable PDF kit is available describing guidelines and containing the questionnaires used by the project.

Additional sections include "Resources" and "Publications." The former includes external links and an 85-page downloadable educator's guide, while the latter offers links to past VOCES newsletters and newspapers.

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Missouri Digital Heritage Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/29/2010 - 12:48

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Painting, Portrait of a Musician, Thomas Hart Benton, 1949

Annotation

This massive mega-website presents thousands of documents and images related to Missouri's social, political, and economic history, linking to collections housed at universities, libraries, and heritage sites across the state. These resources are organized both into archival collections (by topic and source type) and virtual exhibits.

Archival collections include maps, municipal records, government and political records, newspapers, photographs and images, books and diaries, as well as topical collections on agriculture, medicine, women, business, exploration and settlement, art and popular culture, and family, rendering the website's resources as useful for genealogists as for those interested in history.

Exhibits encompass a diverse range of subjects, and include topics of relevance to Missouri history (Miss Carrie Watkins's cookbook from the mid-19th century, several exhibits on life at the University of Missouri and Washington University, Truman's Whistle Stop campaign), and topics outside of Missouri (the body in Medieval manuscripts, Roman imperial coins, propaganda posters from World War II, and drawings documenting dinosaur discovery before the mid-20th century).

Teachers will be especially interested in the large Education section, which includes curricular resources on topics such as African Americans in Missouri, Lewis and Clark's Expedition, Missouri State Fairs, and the history of dueling.

Expansion & Reform, 1801-1861

Civil War & Reconstruction, 1850-1877

Devel. of the Industrial US, 1870-1900

Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

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Religion

Science & Tech.

Women

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Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project

Annotation

"Densho" means "to pass on to the next generation." In this quest, this website offers an archive of more than 668 oral histories presented in countless hours of video interviews on Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Materials also include approximately 12,000 historical photographs, documents, and newspapers. Visitors to this website should keep in mind that Densho is continually engaged in expanding its resources and adding more interviews, photographs, and documents, so be sure to check back periodically to discover new content!

Access to archival materials requires free registration. Once registered, users may select materials according to 32 topics, including immigration, community, religion and churches, education, race and racism, identity values, resistance, economic losses, redress and reparations, and reflections on the past.

Materials available without registration include lesson plans and information on "Causes of the Incarceration," "Civil Rights and Japanese American Incarceration," "Sites of Shame: Japanese American Detention Facilities," and "In the Shadow of My Country: A Japanese American Artist Remembers." The website also offers 90 multimedia materials providing historical context, a timeline, a glossary, and a list of related sources in print and online.

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