"Education and remembrance are the only cures for hatred and bigotry." -Miriam Oster "That is the quote I put on my screen, asking 120 7th graders to tell me what it means on day one of the unit. We do it on day one to establish purpose for the following three weeks. Although it is Geography class, we are diverting from the usual plan of studying a certain area of the world. On the surface, it seems like a history unit. If you look deeper, you'll find the Geography Standards about culture, cooperation, conflict. migration, government structure and others.
But make no mistake, this unit is not about raising test scores associated with standards. It's about raising a generation of decent human beings. It is a unit about the Nazi Holocaust. I was a World War II geek as a young child, and I knew about the Holocaust by the time I was in about 2nd or 3rd grade. I went through a Holocaust Unit in my own middle school too, but I really only have a couple memories of it. One happens to be a project I now look back on in disgust. 3 friends and I had to create a skit involving some aspect of the Holocaust, and we turned it into a comedy of errors with a lackluster Nazi officer trying fruitlessly to track down a Jew that had been in hiding trying to escape. A tasteless attempt at 7th grade humor, right down to the cheesy German accent on our Nazi officer character as he did things like attempt to roll his window down in an open-air cockpit of a plane and missing obvious clues to the whereabouts of the Jewish escapee. "C-... I get what you were going for, but try not to joke about a topic as serious as the Holocaust" wrote Mr. Moore, the single greatest middle school social studies teacher ever. Ouch. C-, my lowest grade of pretty much my entire life, and handed down by the guy I wanted to be someday. He was a goofball, a 12 year old in an adult body, and he told us we shouldn't joke about it. We didn't think we were causing any harm. We were even making the Nazi character look extra dumb. What we didn't realize at the age of 12 though, was that it didn't matter. The Holocaust was not a laughing mater... period. There just isn't an acceptable way to goof around about 11 million people being murdered. In college I had the opportunity to participate in a summer study abroad course in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. The course? Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. An intense look at the Nazi's rise to power and the systematic way they carried out genocide, complete with tours of 5 concentration camps. This was not a survey, this was deep. I can honestly say that besides my wedding (to a fellow study abroad student that I met on the trip, coincidentally) and the birth of my two children, it was the most profound and emotional experience of my life. We were in the former Jewish ghetto of Krakow, we touched the gate of Dachau, we found our way through the tunnel maze of Theresienstadt, and we walked across the selection platform at Auschwitz. Every camp we went to was different in location, size, original purpose and unique history, but they all had something in common. Deafening Silence. It's not that there wasn't any noise. There were tour guides telling stories and pointing out landmarks, the crunch of the ground beneath our shoes, the occasional backpack zipper, but I don't think any of that noise really registered with me. All around us was that deafening silence, hanging over each camp, eliminating all distraction so we could focus intently on learning the biggest lesson of our entire school careers. "Education and remembrance are the only cures for hatred and bigotry." I swore that I would make a point of educating everyone that walked through my classroom door someday that I would educate them. I promised myself I would make sure the Holocaust was remembered. I wanted to be part of the cure. I've been teaching a cross-curricular Holocaust unit paired with reading "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank in Ms. Clarke's Language Arts class. I try to show students how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to twist Germany's situation in the 1920's and 30's in their favor to gain power and influence, and how they built up steadily to a point where they could efficiently carry out the genocide of over 11 million innocent people. One of the most common questions I get is "Why didn't anyone stop Hitler before this happened?" I tell them all the time that the "What If?" game is interesting, but not especially helpful in history. Could someone or something have stopped Hitler before things got to the point of genocide? Of course! His rise to power is littered with examples where it could have been his political or literal demise. Heck, he was drowning as a small child and a Priest saved him! But I tell them "None of that matters... because he WASN'T stopped. The Holocaust DID happen." We are not able to travel back in time and prevent the Holocaust. We ARE able to educate ourselves, remember what happened, and make sure that whenever or wherever we see hatred or bigotry rearing its ugly head in our own lives, we DO something about it. I'd like to think that everyone that goes through our unit has a better understanding of their role in it all. I would hope that these 12 and 13 year old kids would be equipped to recognize hatred and bigotry and stand up to it. It is my greatest wish that no matter what their Math and ELA test scores are, they at least leave 7th grade as a caring human being. Sadly, I know that won't always be the case. I have found a Swastika etched into a desktop with eraser. Students have heiled Hitler because they think it's funny. Those isolated instances infuriate me to no end, but I must remember that I played the role of a slapstick, hapless Nazi officer in 7th grade too... all to try and get laughs. These kids haven't been to the camps. They still think they're immortal. They don't understand that each of those 11 million people was a unique individual. They don't know how beautiful and fleeting life is. Heck, even Anne Frank's diary will go over most of their heads because she had a perspective on life that (luckily) none of these seventh graders have. No matter how many images, video clips, diary excerpts or stories I share, it's unlikely I will reach everyone on a deep enough level. Heck, I don't even fully grasp what happened. I don't think anyone can unless they were there. Yet, I would not give this unit up or replace it with anything else. I will continue trying to arm them with as many Holocaust resources as possible so they can explore as far and deep as they want to. I will continue sharing stories of my own camp visits. I will continue stressing that regular Germans allowed this to spiral out of control, even if they weren't directly responsible for the genocide. That could be anybody. That could be us. That's why this is the most important lesson of the year. My job is to educate them and make them remember... because I firmly believe if a cure for hatred and bigotry exists, that's it.
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AuthorJohn Honish: Archives
June 2021
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