Survivors and Witnesses: Video Testimony

Teachers know their students best. It is important that you take the time to preview resources before you share them with your students to make sure they are appropriate for the intellectual and emotional needs of your students. Let students know in advance when they are about to encounter material that some may find upsetting.

Review your class contract with students before sharing any resources in this collection. This will help reinforce the norms you have established and reestablish the idea of the classroom as a brave and reflective space for students to voice concerns, questions, or emotions that may arise.

Be prepared for a variety of responses from students. Students often react to the Holocaust with sadness, anger, or frustration, yet it is also the case that many students do not have an immediate public response to learning about the Holocaust. Many teachers have been surprised by some students’ lack of emotion during a lesson on the Holocaust. Experience has taught us that it can take time before students are able and ready to make sense of this material. In the meantime, many students report that their journals provide a safe space where they can begin to process their emotions and ideas. Therefore, we recommend that students have frequent opportunities to write in their journals.

Placing these testimonies in a larger context can be crucial to students’ understanding of these first hand accounts. To provide your students with more information about the time and places in which the Holocaust occurred, have them read appropriate context for the survivors’ stories that you plan share. You can find this context in our book Holocaust and Human Behavior.

Many of the stories shared by survivors and witnesses make references to places that may be new to students. Some students may find it beneficial to have a visual of the places the survivor describes including a map or other images. In some instances, it may be helpful for students to gain a visual understanding of the location and number of Nazi-organized ghettos and concentration and death camps. You can find the map that provides this information in the Facing History reading Establishing the Killing Centers. 

The videos in this collection may include vocabulary terms such as ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers. If that is the case, we recommend that you post simple definitions of each of these words in the room to help students understand and distinguish between them:

• Ghetto: a specific area of a city or town in which Jews were forced to live (and often not permitted to leave). Ghettos were overcrowded and deprived of sufficient food and other basic supplies.
• Concentration camp: a camp created to confine large numbers of prisoners (including political opponents and those deemed racially inferior) in harsh and unhealthy conditions.
• Killing center: a camp designed for the purpose of murdering large numbers of victims, primarily in gas chambers, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The reality of the Nazi ghetto and camp system is quite complex, as the Nazis operated more than 40,000 ghettos and camps that served a variety of purposes and varied in size and operation. But for the videos in our collection, these three definitions should suffice.