News

People and War: the beginning of the Second World War through eyewitness testimonies

The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust has published an internet-based lesson, available in the Polish language, to help teachers around Poland in educating students about the Second World War. The presented material can be used during history classes, social studies, was well as while teaching lessons about the Polish language and culture.

The lesson is the result of the cooperative effort between the Institute for Visual History and Education from the Shoah Foundation (SFI), University of Southern California, and the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust (ICEAH). Its integral elements are the use of audio-visual testimonies, which constitute the basis of the lesson. The testimonies are from the archives of the Shoah Foundation Institute. The authors of the lesson are Anna Motyczka and Martin Šmok.

Presentation

The chronology of the lessons includes the first months of the War and the events, which are presented from the perspective of the individuals who are speaking about their own experiences and the events that took place around them. Political events at the state and international levels, government actions, and military operations are the background to the stories, and the task of the teacher is their proper presentation. Starting from the German and, later, Soviet invasion of Poland, the impact of historical events on the lives of individual people is presented during the lessons.

The lesson also deals with the problem of making complex decisions about whether to escape or to remain at home as well as the consequences of those decisions. Getting to know the testimony of individuals who directly participated in those historical events helps to better explain the behavior of certain communities, which in turn allows for a deeper understanding of the general reception by modern society of the described Wartime situations.

The lesson is to address the questions concerning the events preceding the Holocaust, the annihilation of the Jewish population, defined by the Nazis as “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

The history of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people and the history of the totalitarian rule under the Soviet led Communist governments are two separate subjects of study, research, and education. The task of this lesson is not to compare the two regimes, but it is an attempt at understanding the impact these systems had on society as well as the fate of individual Polish citizens of Jewish origin who faced the War and the two totalitarian regimes.

The lesson consists of two parts:

• Part I: September 1939 — the start of the Second World War
• Part II: Where to next?…

On September 1, 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. This date is generally considered the beginning of World War II. On September 17 of that year, the Red Army attacked the country from the east. This began a long period of occupation. As a result of the war claimed the lives of about 5.6-5.8 million inhabitants of Poland; 60% of these individuals were Jewish. Although the war has ended more than half a century ago, it is difficult to find a family in Poland, which has not felt the effects of the Second World War, and memories of this period are still alive in society. Therefore, in deepening knowledge about events that took place during the War years, allows for better understanding of the many phenomena that occur in modern Poland.