Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Remember, lest we forget and repeat

An important date occurs in two weeks. Holocaust Remembrance Day is on May 1st this year. The date is set by the Hebrew calendar and corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan. It also marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Holocaust was a time in history that represents just how depraved human beings can act towards one another. By the time the Holocaust was over in 1945, 11 million people had lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis. Six million of those people were Jewish. The other five million people who died were Soviet POWs, Non-Jewish Poles, Romanis (Gypsies), people with disabilities, homosexual people, and Jehovah's Witnesses. In the span of a few years, 11 million people died. That is mind-boggling.


The Holocaust is a topic that many people find hard to talk about and especially to teach. Some history books gloss over it, dedicating maybe a paragraph or two to the tragedy. It deserves more than a paragraph or two. 11 million lives deserve more than a paragraph or two. This is a topic that students need to learn about. Genocides are still being committed around the world - look at what happened in Rwanda, the Sudan, and northern Iraq. Students need to learn about what hate has done to people in the past so they can be informed about how to make changes in the future. Students need to have a solid understanding of the past if they are destined to have solid footing when they walk into the future. The Holocaust is a hard topic to teach because it is not a pretty topic, but history is seldom filled with pretty topics. The Holocaust is heart-wrenching and emotional. The images are disturbing and shocking. The reason students need to hear about the events and need to see the pictures are so they understand what happened and why it happened. They need to see what can happen when hatred spins out of control and becomes acceptable.






A good resource to use when teaching about the Holocaust is the book "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" by Hana Volavkova. This book is a compilation of poems and drawings done by the children who were housed at the Terezin concentration camp during the Holocaust. The poems and drawings express the children's desires, fears, longings, and beliefs. This book allows the reader a glimpse into what the children were thinking during this horrific episode in history. Fifteen thousand children entered Terezin but only 100 lived to tell the tale. This book gives a voice to many of the children who did not make it out. It is a book that allows students today to connect to the past because it is told by children.

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