Teachers in the Kansas City area, many who began the school year this week, are looking for new ways to make an impact on students with Holocaust education. Several have gone on trips to Europe to glean new information and multimedia tools for their classrooms.
Lisa Bauman, a teacher at St. Thomas Aquinas High School, has been involved with the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education for about 14 years. She has taken students to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for the last 11 years and taken a smaller group to Berlin, Prague and Krakow for the last six years.
“Just being in the places that we’ve read about in class makes a huge impact,” Bauman said. “Even if it’s just going to the Holocaust museum (in Washington), there is such a sense of being in the place and seeing the artifacts. There’s something about it when you take kids out of the classroom, it makes it more real to them. There’s nothing like being in Auschwitz and walking by the barracks and seeing crematoria; there’s just a physical sense that you get of the horror of the place.”
In Prague, a Holocaust survivor guides her students through the Theresienstadt camp. They also visit the hiding place of Otto Wolf, a Czech teenager, and his family, where Bauman’s students recently helped erect a memorial.
“It’s a really intense learning experience; the kids are journaling constantly,” Bauman said.
Since most of her students do not go on the European trip, while she is gone, Bauman arranges for classroom activities to mirror what she is doing with the students on the trip.
“We keep a blog the whole time we’re on the trip, so we post every day what we’re doing. One of the requirements is that they follow the blog and post comments,” she said. “When we are at Schindler’s factory, my students are watching ‘Schindler’s List.’
My students are seeing people in these places they’re learning about and reading about.”
Bauman credits MCHE for getting her so involved in Holocaust education.
“I would not be doing what I’m doing today if not for the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. Getting involved with them allowed me to take classes on the Holocaust, learn the history and meet incredible people … if I hadn’t been part of the (MCHE teaching) cadre, I never would have gotten the regional (teaching) fellowship for the (national Holocaust) museum,” she said.
Two other local teachers went on a trip to the European Holocaust sites this year under the auspices of The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, an organization that recognizes and supports people who assisted Jews during the Holocaust.
Terry Beasley, a teacher at Lake-view Middle School in Kansas City, Mo., and Christopher Bobal, who teaches at Lee’s Summit High School, had both previously been part of the foundation’s Alfred Lerner fellowship program, which brings teachers to Columbia University in New York for a week of courses about the Holocaust.
This year, Beasley and Bobal attended the foundation’s European study program, which allows teachers to visit Munich, Weimar, Berlin, Dachau, Buchenwald and the House of the Wannsee Conference in Germany and Warsaw, Krakow, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
Holocaust experts such as historian Robert Jan van Pelt guided the tour.
For Beasley, who teaches about Elie Wiesel’s “Night” to her students, walking in the footsteps of the Jewish people in the Holocaust had the biggest impact of the whole trip.
“I think being able to retrace, like when we went to the mass grave sites, you would walk through the woods to get there. At Birkenau, we walked the exact path they would have taken, going through the tree-lined woods,” she said. “I think that was probably one of the most powerful because you’re walking that same path as so many thousands of people.”
When Beasley started teaching Wiesel’s book in her class, she decided she did not have the necessary expertise for the task.
“I felt like I didn’t know as much as I needed to, and that’s when I got involved with (MCHE). It is a high interest topic to my students. I just felt like I needed to learn as much as I possibly could so I could accurately teach them,” Beasley said.
Bauman got involved with MCHE because of a similar situation.
“When I started teaching in 1989, I had to teach ‘Night.’ I didn’t know the history; I used to have a teacher from down the hall do the introduction and teach the history,” Bauman said.
Beasley said she will use photos and videos she made during the trip in her classroom.
“They aren’t just looking at historical photos; I can show them here’s what it looks like today … they get a better feel for what conditions were like. It’s not just something from a text book,” she said. “My students respond really well when it’s personal.”
She also plans to draw parallels between the initial discrimination Jews faced in Germany and bullying.
“It’s important to ensure students have an understanding of the magnitude of the event and how it has impacted generations of people and how we think about genocide in the modern day,” said Christopher Bobal.
The most powerful moments of the trip for him were when he walked around Auschwitz-Birkenau by himself for a few hours and when they stopped at a train station in Berlin.
“There were no other tourists there, and just being there in that silence … it was very powerful to think about what had happened there,” Bobal said. “We were in Berlin, and we went to a train station — the remnants of the tracks — where Jews were transported out of Berlin to various camps. The memorial had how many people were shipped out day by day… we were there 70 years to the date of one of those days … It just got me; I got goose bumps.”
When he goes back to the classroom this fall, Bobal said he’ll supplement his current curriculum with “a lot more pictures and maps to try to help students understand where people were being taken from and where they were going to and what that meant.” Students in his class already write essays based on MCHE’s White Rose essay contest theme each year.
Bobal and Beasley both plan to share their experiences meeting people deemed “righteous” by the JFR at a luncheon in Warsaw during their trip.
“People who risked their lives for others … (Helping) wasn’t anything extraordinary (to them). They were doing what they felt they had to do, what was right,” Bobal said. “This group of people took a chance. I certainly would like to bring that into what I teach.”