News
What Did A Witness See? Responsibility and the Influence of the Individual on the Course of Events
The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Museum is cooperating with the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California on a multimedia package for teaching about the Holocaust and Tolerance.
The package is based on excerpts from Polish-language video accounts collected by the Shoah Foundation, together with photographs and documents from the Museum Archives. The authors are Piotr Trojański and Robert Szuchta, who published the first Holocaust textbook in Poland in 2003. Dr. Marek Kucia of the Jagiellonian University Sociology Institute is a consultant.
An introductory lesson, titled “In the Face of Destruction: Rescuers, Bystanders, Perpetrators, and their Accomplices,” is already available online (college.usc.edu/vhi/wobliczuzaglady). It contains accounts by five Jewish survivors and one rescuer. The goal is to analyze the complex role that individuals played in the Holocaust.
The scenario is designed above all for history, Polish, and social studies teachers with students in the 15-19 age group. The lesson includes information on the historical context, and also features source material and useful illustrations and tables. Edward J. Phillips has provided financial support for the project.
The complete set of classroom materials will be packaged together with DVDs. The project also includes training about the Holocaust for Polish teachers who want to use the material in the classroom.
Alicja Bielecka, head of the ICEAH Program Section, is responsible for organizing these training sessions. She says that the goal of the project is not only to teach about the Holocaust, but also to encourage students to question themselves, think critically and analytically, search for answers of their own, and develop individual reflection on this issue. “We are looking at about three years of work,” she says. “The Shoah Foundation is now raising funds for continuing the preparations.”
The archives of the Shoah Foundation contain over 52 thousand accounts by Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses to history—the largest collection of its kind in the world.
