The Holocaust: Bearing Witness

About This Lesson

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce students to the enormity of the crimes committed during the Holocaust and to help them bear witness to the experiences of those targeted by the Nazis. In this lesson, students will continue this unit’s historical case study by learning about four phases of the Holocaust and then looking closely at stories of a few individuals who were targeted by Nazi brutality. Students will also examine firsthand accounts of individuals who worked to preserve their human dignity in the face of dehumanization, and they will use those stories to help them think about the meaning and purpose of resistance during the Holocaust.

The next lesson focuses on the role of perpetrators and bystanders, as well as acts of resistance and courage by upstanders and rescuers during the Holocaust. The material in these two lessons reminds students of the importance of living in a democracy whose institutions safeguard civil and human rights and whose citizens are capable of making informed judgments, not only on behalf of themselves but on behalf of a larger community.

Essential Questions

Unit Essential Question: What does learning about the choices people made during the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the Holocaust teach us about the power and impact of our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• What was the Holocaust? Why is it important to confront the brutality of this history?
• What did it mean to resist the Nazis? What kinds of resistance were those targeted by the Nazis able to carry out?
• What is the meaning of human dignity? How did the Nazis seek to deprive their victims of basic human dignity, and how did those targeted attempt to preserve or reclaim their dignity?

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to explain the range of Nazi methods of mass murder, including the establishment of Jewish ghettos, mobile killing units, concentration camps, and killing centers.
• Students will bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, as well as extraordinary acts of resistance and efforts to preserve human dignity on the part of victims and survivors.

Lesson Plans

Day 1

Activity 1: Prepare Students to Confront the Holocaust

• Project the poem “For Yom Ha’Shoah,” from the reading Take This Giant Leap, by Sonia Weitz, a Holocaust survivor. We suggest having students read the poem aloud at least two times. After reading, ask students to respond to the following questions in their journals:
  • What does this poem mean to you?
  • What does this poem suggest it is like to learn about the Holocaust?
  • What questions does the poem raise for you?
• Then ask students to share their responses to these prompts. Their questions about the poem can be recorded on the board so that they can be revisited at the end of the lesson, when students have greater familiarity with the Holocaust.

Activity 2: Understand the Steps Leading to Mass Murder

• While the primary goal of this lesson is to provide students with the opportunity bear witness to some specific stories and experiences of individuals who lived or died during the Holocaust, it is first necessary to briefly give students a framework to understand what happened.
• In the video Step by Step: Phases of the Holocaust (06:47), historian Doris Bergen divides the history of the Holocaust into four phases, described on the handout Phases of the Holocaust.  Pass out the handout and give students a few moments to read through the information. Then show the video so that students can hear Bergen’s description of the four phases.

Activity 3: Reflect on a Range of Primary Sources

• In this activity, students will have the opportunity to work independently to reflect on and bear witness to a variety of stories and experiences during the Holocaust.
• First, students will watch a short video with testimony from a Holocaust survivor from the city of Vilna, Lithuania. The Jews of Vilna were forced into ghettos after the German invasion in 1941, and tens of thousands of them were then murdered either in mass shootings or at the Sobibór killing center. Show the class the video The Nazis in Vilna (05:06). After the clip is over, give students a few minutes to write in their journals in response to the following questions:
  • What about Jack Arnel’s testimony is most striking to you? What does it make you think about or feel?
  • What is the value of hearing this kind of firsthand account? How does it change how you understand the Holocaust?
• Tell students that in order to bear witness to the many ways that people experienced and responded to the brutality of the Holocaust, they will be looking at images from the period and reading the words of people who were there. They will also view two maps to get a sense of the scope of the Nazi atrocities.
• Set up a gallery walk by placing the following resources on tables or hanging them around the room:
  • Map: Jewish Ghettos in Eastern Europe
  • Map: Main Nazi Camps and Killing Sites
  • Image: The Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto
  • Handout: Mobile Killing Units
  • Handout: Auschwitz
  • Handout: We May Not Have Another Chance
  • Handout: Diary from the Łódź Ghetto
• Ask students to silently “tour” the gallery. Give them eight minutes (or longer if you have more time) to view or read as many of the resources as they can. For each one they view, ask them to do the following in their journals:
  • Record the name of the resource.
  • If it is a text-based resource: Record a sentence, phrase, or detail you think is striking or significant.
  • If it is an image: Describe a part of the image that provokes a question, observation, or emotional response from you.
• When students are finished, rather than return to their desks, ask them to visit the graffiti board you have set up in advance and write a response to the resources they encountered. They might add one or more of the notes they took during the gallery walk to the graffiti board, or they might write a new thought, observation, or feeling they are experiencing after viewing the resources.
• Give students five minutes to finish their silent writing, but leave the graffiti board up in the classroom for the next day or longer so that students have additional time to reflect on the activity, view their peers’ responses, and add new comments.

Day 2

Activity 1: Acknowledge Graffiti Board Responses

Begin class by encouraging students to continue interacting with the graffiti board. You might read aloud a few responses from the board so that students can hear each other’s thoughts. If you have the time, you might also give students a few minutes to go up to the graffiti board, read comments from yesterday (especially if other classes added to the same graffiti board since you last met), and add new thoughts and observations.

Activity 2: Explore Resistance

• Explain to students that it is crucial in a study of the Holocaust to acknowledge the various ways that Jews and others targeted by the Nazis resisted.
• Students will often associate the idea of resistance with violent or armed rebellion. It is important to acknowledge that such actions did occur, such as the efforts of Jewish partisan groups, the sabotage of the crematoria by Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, or the Warsaw ghetto uprising (see the extension Explore Additional Examples of Jewish Resistance below). Tell students that scholar Michael Berenbaum writes that for those who resisted violently, “Death was a given.” Ask students to consider the question: If death was a given, why might Jews resist anyway?
• Then explain to students that there are other types of resistance for them to consider. Pass out the reading A Basic Feeling of Human Dignity and read it aloud with the class.
• After reading, ask students to respond in their journals to the following questions:
  • What is dignity? What do you think Lévy-Hass means by the phrase “a basic feeling of human dignity”? How did the Germans try to deprive Lévy-Hass and her fellow prisoners of this feeling?
  • How did Lévy-Hass attempt to restore dignity for some of those imprisoned in her camp? Were her efforts an act of resistance?
• Lead a class discussion in response to these questions, using the Think, Pair, Share strategy. Then introduce students to the idea of spiritual resistance by providing them with the following definition: 
  Spiritual resistance: the struggle to maintain a sense of identity, dignity, faith, and culture in the degrading and dehumanizing systems of the ghettos and camps.

Activity 3: Create a Found Poem with the Words of a Survivor

• Students will finish this lesson by returning to the words of Hannah Lévy-Hass to create a found poem.
• Read aloud A Basic Feeling of Human Dignity once more. This time, as students read along, they will highlight or copy down words and phrases from the diary entry that they find especially powerful. Their goal is to eventually narrow down their list of words and phrases to 15 or 20.
• Then pass out the handout Creating a Found Poem and go over the instructions with students. Students might want to copy the words and phrases they selected onto notecards or separate scraps of paper so that they can easily rearrange them. Tell students to try to arrange the words in a way that captures the essence of Lévy-Hass’s testimony, as well as their experience of hearing it.
• When students are satisfied with their poems, tell them to add titles. Ask them to turn in their poems or complete them for homework. At the beginning of the next class period, you might ask a few students to share their poems aloud with the class.

Activity 4: Exit Tickets

End this lesson by having students complete an exit ticket to give you a sense of how they are responding to this emotionally challenging content. Have students read the poem “For Yom Ha’Shoah” again, and then ask them to write on their cards about what this poem means to them after learning more about the Holocaust.