Responding to a Refugee Crisis

About This Lesson

In the previous lesson, students learned about Kristallnacht and explored the range of choices people made in response to the violence and destruction of those coordinated attacks on Jews in Nazi Germany. In this lesson, students will learn about one significant consequence of Kristallnacht and other instances of Nazi aggression in 1938: an intensifying refugee crisis. They will explore how countries around the world responded to thousands of European Jews trying to escape the danger of Nazi Germany. Students will think deeply about the rights and responsibilities of governments to respond to events that take place within the borders of other countries, and they will hear the testimonies of Holocaust survivors describing their experiences as they tried to escape from Nazi Germany before World War II.

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 challenges prevented many Jews from leaving Nazi Germany?
• What responsibility does a country have to help those from another country who are facing danger?

Learning Objectives

• Students will analyze texts describing the choices countries made in response to the European Jewish refugee crisis in the late 1930s in order to deepen their thinking about the responsibilities of governments and individuals to people outside their borders.
• Students will respond to video testimony of Holocaust survivors describing the difficulties of escaping Nazi Germany in 1939.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Reflect on the Rights and Responsibilities of Countries to Act

Tell students that in this lesson they will learn about the efforts of many Jews to leave Nazi-controlled areas and the barriers they faced, in large part, because of other countries’ unwillingness to help them. Begin by asking students to copy the statement below into their journals and then respond to it. Do they agree or disagree with the statement? Why?

When a government commits violence against the people of its own country, other countries have a responsibility to intervene, stop the violence, and help the victims.

After students have had a few minutes to respond, encourage them to share their viewpoints in a short class discussion. If you have time, you might debrief their responses using the Barometer teaching strategy.

Activity 2: Analyze World Responses to German Aggression

Explain to students that in 1938, Nazi Germany expanded into Austria and Czechoslovakia without other nations acting in those countries’ defense. Germany’s expansion put millions more Jews in danger of persecution by the Nazis, and the violence of Kristallnacht (in November 1938) caused many fearful Jews in these countries to try to emigrate to other countries. But emigration wasn’t so simple, because other countries weren’t willing to take them in.

Prepare the class for Jigsaw discussions by arranging students in groups of three. Assign one of the following three readings to each group:

• Jewish Refugees from Austria
• The Evian Conference
• World Responses to Kristallnacht (Instruct students to begin reading at the paragraph “Despite worldwide outrage . . .")

Each group will read its reading together and then discuss the following questions:

• How did the countries in this reading respond to the refugee crisis? What reasons did they give for their response? What determined whether or not countries were willing to accept Jewish refugees? What do the countries’ responses say about how each of them defined its universe of obligation?

Let students know that they will each be required to share their group’s response to these questions with a new group, and encourage them to each write down their group’s response in preparation for that task.

After students have had time to read and discuss their readings, instruct the class to form “expert” groups of three. Set up these groups so that each member of an expert group will bring a different reading to the group. In their new groups, students should take turns summarizing their readings and sharing their first group’s response to the discussion question.

After the expert groups have completed their tasks, ask students to take a moment to complete an S-I-T reflection in their journals. They should name and write about one thing they learned about world responses to the refugee crisis that surprises them, one thing that they find interesting, and one thing that troubles them.

Activity 3: Respond to Personal Accounts of the Refugee Crisis

Tell students that they will watch two videos of Holocaust survivors discussing their efforts to leave Germany in 1939.

Before showing the first video, Turned Away on the M.S. St. Louis (06:28), share with students the following context:
On May 14, 937 men, women, and children boarded a ship, the St. Louis, in Hamburg, Germany. Each had paid $150—a significant sum of money in 1939—for written permission to enter Cuba. While the ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the Cuban government changed its mind and prohibited the refugees from entering the country. The ship sailed along the coast of Florida, hoping the US government would accept the refugees, but the United States turned the ship away, and it sailed back to Europe. The passengers were eventually admitted into Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, and France. In this video, Holocaust survivor Sol Messinger describes his experiences aboard the M.S. St. Louis.

Before showing the second video, Preparing for the Kindertransport (07:06), share with students the following context:
Between December 1938 and September 1939, a group of Christians and Jews organized an effort to rescue Jewish children, under the age of 17, by bringing them to England to live with families or at schools and on farms. They focused their efforts on children because they feared the British would see adults as competitors for jobs, housing, and social services. In all, the operation rescued 10,000 children, though it forced them to separate from their families (often permanently). In this video, Vera Gissing, a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia, recalls how her family prepared her for the Kindertransport.

• After viewing the videos, ask students to respond to the following questions in their journals:
  • What did watching these videos make you think and feel?
  • How does hearing a firsthand account from a survivor add to your understanding of the difficulties Jews experienced in attempting to flee Nazi Germany?

Finish the lesson by asking students to review their journal response from the beginning of the lesson. Ask them now to write for a moment about how what they learned and experienced in this lesson either changed or confirmed their initial thinking about whether or not countries have a responsibility to intervene when other countries act violently toward the people living within their own borders.