The Importance of Holocaust Education

I have not always been open about being Jewish. There are certain spaces and places where it puts a target on your back, and changes how people interact with you. There have been moments in my life when I have felt unsafe solely because of my religion. There have been moments in my life when I have felt unwelcome because of my religion. There have been moments in my life when I have been ostracized and rejected because of my religion. But in the wake of recent events, it has become that much more important to me to share this part of my identity, both with students and others. The more antisemitism I encounter in the world, the more that I find myself wanting to embrace my faith and my culture.

In the wake of Tennessee schools banning Maus, an article on which can be found here, I found myself thinking about how to include the graphic novel in my curriculum. As I was planning the unit, it saddened me to discover that many students had limited to no knowledge about the Holocaust. While Maus is a powerful graphic novel, it also metaphorically depicts events of the Holocaust as mice (Jewish people) and cats (Nazis). How was I going to have students understand the human horrors of the Holocaust? I had one idea, but it felt like a long-shot. Through one of my trips to Israel, I had the opportunity to teach with a woman who has gone on to found an organization aimed at Holocaust education. She has participated in the March of the Living on multiple occasions, and works with survivors to record, preserve, and share their stories. I reached out with little hope that she'd be able to help me on such short notice. I was wrong. It was through this friend that I was put in touch with Hedy Bohm--the kind of truly genuine person who was more concerned about students being able to eat their lunch than her own schedule for the day. But we were able to arrange a two-part lecture over Google Meet about Mrs. Bohm's experiences during the Holocaust.

Have you ever sat in a room of teenagers that was completely silent? I have never in my life experienced such rapt students, who, I might add, voluntarily gave up their lunch to listen to Mrs. Bohm's story. This skyrocketed to the top as one of the highlights of my teaching career. Hedy Bohm survived Auschwitz as a teenager, and lost both of her parents and numerous friends along the way. Her story, while heartbreaking and traumatic, is filled with resilience and optimism. She built a life for herself out of the ashes of Auschwitz, and in her later years has devoted her life to sharing her story with young people. And the students of Sturgis not only voluntarily attended, but asked questions and listened with genuine interest.

Not only did this get students discussing the Holocaust, and current antisemitism, but it also prompted conversations between my colleagues and myself about how we are teaching the Holocaust in our classrooms. My fellow English department colleagues and I discussed teaching Night at the ninth grade level, history teachers shared how they were teaching genocide in their classrooms. It wasn’t that these conversations weren’t happening at Sturgis prior to this moment, it was that I had become part of them. It was incredible to hear how other teachers were approaching the subject, and to share the deeply personal reasons why teaching the Holocaust has become so important to me. 

It was through a conversation with a colleague that I was introduced to the program Echoes and Reflections, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and the Shoah Foundation, at Yad Vashem. This program offers a fellowship to US educators to spend ten days in Jerusalem, Israel at the Holocaust museum, learning about the Holocaust and offering an andragogy of Holocaust education. I sent out an application, assuming that I would be one of hundreds of applicants (which I was). But to my surprise I have been accepted! Thanks to a grant from Sturgis, I have been able to accept this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend 10 days of my summer in Jerusalem, surrounded by fellow educators, with first-hand exposure to the resources and archives at Yad Vashem. I will be able to bring this experience back to Sturgis, and hopefully grow how we approach and educate not only my students but every student at Sturgis about the harsh realities of the Holocaust and the ways we can combat current antisemitism as well as other forms of discrimination in the classroom.

Antisemitism is on the rise. It is on the rise in the United States. And it is on the rise on Cape Cod. We are not immune. And it has become that much more important for me, as a Jewish woman and educator, to share my experiences with a community that has so embraced me. People have said “never again” since the Holocaust happened. And we cannot let the antisemitism that we are seeing today grow to where it was in the 1930s. And it starts with education.