This document outlines an upcoming workshop on understanding the voices and choices of young people during the Holocaust. It includes an excerpt from a Holocaust survivor emphasizing the importance of helping students become human and avoid producing "learned monsters." The workshop will use Facing History and Ourselves resources to examine identity, conformity, and moral dilemmas faced by youth through readings and activities. Participants will tour the Museum of Tolerance and discuss how new Holocaust scholarship confirms and challenges understandings of human behavior during that time. The goal is to explore how knowledge of the past can inform young people's participation in critical historical moments.

1. February 15-16, 2017 Museum of Tolerance
Understanding the Voices and
Choices of Young People During the
Holocaust
FACING HISTORY AND OURSELVES & THE MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE

2. Dear Teacher:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw
what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and
college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your
efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled
psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they
serve to make our children more human.

3. Facing History and Ourselves:
Scope & Sequence

4. Facing History Pedagogy

5. Facing History & Boston Public Schools:Facing History’s Case Studies
•The individual and society
•The power of difference
•Difficult moments in history
•The fragility of democracy
•Choices & human behavior
•Multiple perspectives
•Moral & ethical dilemmas
•Civic participation today

6. » ICE BREAKER STRATEGY: CIRCLE WITHIN A CIRCLE/LINE DANCE
» What brings you to this workshop?
» What is your personal connection to this history or to the study of
this history?
» Given the new year, what do you hope for most moving forward as
an educator?

7. Contracting

8. Our Norms
1. Think with your head and your heart.
2.If you don’t understand something,
ask a question.
3.Listen with respect.
4.Share the talking time.

9. Session: Understanding Youth Identity
During the Holocaust
What are the complex factors that contribute to a person's identity?

10. What are the different
parts of your identity?
Journal

11. Identity Charts
What words or phrases would you use to describe yourself?

12. How do our identities - or awareness of
our identities - shift based on
circumstance or context?

13. The Danger of a Single Story
A Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie
Do others
see us the
way we see
ourselves?

14. Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie describes the effects that
labels can have on how we think about ourselves and others:
…Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to
university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate
was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English
so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to
have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to
what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very
disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She
assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me
was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her
default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing,
well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a
single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no
possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility
of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as
human equals.

15. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of
the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The
political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were
debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in
America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There
were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the
healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the
border, that sort of thing.
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara,
watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the
marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight
surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I
had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they
had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had
bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been
more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story,
show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again,
and that is what they become.

16. Inside/Outside Identity Chart

17. I’m Still Here - Salvaged Pages

19. 19
Young Voices and Choices
1. Break into groups to read a bio and journal entry excerpt from
the following young people:
a. Elsa Binder
b.Ilya Gerber
c. Yitskhok Rudashevski
d.David Rubinowicz
e. Elisabeth Kaufmann
f. Klaus Langer
g. Peter Feigl
2. Create an identity chart
a. Include 1-2 key passages from their diary entries that connects
to an aspect of their identity which becomes pronounced or
emphasized as a result of their experience in the Holocaust.

20. Museum of Tolerance Tour
Experience
Includes shortened Holocaust, Prejudice, History Wall with Focus on Children, Civil
Rights

21. Personal Journal
After experiencing the museum tour, what are you
thinking about? What is coming up for you?
Page 5 of the journal has a space for reactions and
reflections.

22. Readings from Holocaust and Human Behavior Resource Book
Session: Turning Neighbor Against
Neighbor
Going deeper into Human Behavior, examining choices made by ordinary German Citizens in the
1930's

23. Essential Questions
How does identity influence the choices made?
What other factors influenced choices?
Why and how does neighbor turn against
neighbor?
What is the universe of obligation?

25. Universe of obligation
…the name Sociologist Helen Fein has given the circle of
individuals and groups “toward whom obligations are
owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for
amends.”
Accounting for Genocide, 1979

27. Instructions
Each group has been assigned a reading that looks at the
effects of Hitler’s consolidation of power in the 1930’s on the
lives of ordinary Germans. The following is a list of selected
readings from Holocaust and Human Behavior:
“Controlling The Universities” (chapter 5)
“No Time To Think” (chapter 5)
“Isolating Homosexuals” (chapter 5)
“Do You Take The Oath?” (chapter 5)
“The Birthday Party” (chapter 6)
“Even If All Others Do – I Do Not!” (chapter 6)

28. Instructions
Step 1: Read the assigned text as a group
Step 2: Discuss the following questions:
A.What is the dilemma/decision presented in the reading?
B.How does this dilemma/decision challenge this person’s
universe of obligation?
C.What is the range of choices/options that the individual
faces?
D.What is the ultimate decision that person makes?
Step 3: Based on your discussion in your group, create a
visual representation of the moral dilemma in your reading.
(You can all have the same visualization within your group,
just make sure you have your own copy/version of it.)

29. Example Visual Representation from “Fear”

30. Give One Get One
You will now circulate the room and meet someone who
had a different reading (moral dilemma) than you. Take a
couple of minutes to describe your reading and the moral
dilemma your subject faced. Share your image.
After you have “given” your story, you will “get” another
example a moral dilemma from your partner. What
common threads are you noticing?
When you hear the signal, thank your partner and find
someone in the room with a story different from yours or
your partner’s for another round of “Give One Get One.”

31. Questions to Consider
What struck you about your reading or one of the readings
that you heard during Give One Get One?
What connections are you making to our earlier session on
identity?
Teacher Lens: What skills are addressed in this activity?
How might you use elements of this activity in your
classroom?

32. A Survivor's Voice
Museum of Tolerance

33. Exit Card

34. Connections
Day Two

35. Conformity and Consent: What are the
pressures influencing behaviors of
conformity and consent in society?

36. Journal
What measures do we use to influence the behavior
of young people?
When is it appropriate?
When is it manipulative?

37. Heil Hitler!
Confessions of a Hitler Youth
What are the
factors that shaped
Alfons Heck’s
sense of identity
influenced his
decisions?

39. “The experience of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany
constitutes a massive case of child abuse. Out of
millions of basically innocent children, Hitler and his
regime succeeded in creating potential monsters.
Could it happen again today? Of course it can.
Children are like empty vessels, you can fill them with
good, you can fill them with evil, you can fill them
with hate, you can fill them with compassion. So the
story of the Hitler Youth can be repeated because
despite Auschwitz, the world has not changed for the
better all that much.”
~ Alfons Heck

40. As you read, consider the following questions:
●What are the pressures children face to conform
to Nazi ideology?
●What choices to the young people in your
reading make and how do they come to them?
●What impact can you see or infer on young
people in your reading?
Jig-Saw and Found Poem

41. Pairs and Themes
(A) Making exceptions for individuals while condemning the group
○ Learning to Be a Good German
○ Can a National Socialist Have Jewish Friends?
(B) Dissent
○ Rejecting Nazism
○ Disillusionment in the Hitler Youth
(C) Coercion and pressure
○ Models of Obedience
○ Youth on the Margins
(D) Socialization and Indoctrination
○ Schooling for the National Community
○ “Heil Hitler!”: Lessons of Daily Life

42. After reading - creating poems
1.With your partner, create a found poem for the
paired readings:
a. Identify key words, phrases and passages from
both readings that help illuminate your theme
b. Rearrange and determine an order of words and
phrases to create a poem

43. After reading - sharing poems
-
1.Find three other pairs that looked at different
readings. In your group of 8, you should have
representation of all readings: A, B, C, D
2.Share your found poems with each other, then
discuss:
a. What similarities do you see across your poems?
What differences?
b. What key ideas did you discover in your readings?
c. What new images of young people during the
Holocaust do you now have?

44. Synthesizing Our Learning About the Holocaust
Essential Question:
How does the new scholarship confirm and/or
challenge our understandings of human
behavior during the holocaust?

46. The Content: What’s New?
• Understanding Motivation: new focus on
consensus, collaboration and opportunism
• Race and Space: integrating the war and the
Holocaust, ideologically and chronologically
• Civilian Experiences: new emphasis on
people in occupied countries beyond
ghettos and camps

47. Essential Question
How does the new scholarship confirm
and/or complicate our understandings of
human behavior during the Holocaust?

48. Race and Space (chapter 8)
According to historian Doris Bergen, the Nazi policies
concerning “race” and “space” were closely related:
Hitler was obsessed with two notions: that humanity was
engaged in a giant struggle between “races,” or
communities of “blood”; and that “pure Germans,”
members of the so-called Aryan race, needed space to
expand . . . Any race that was not expanding, he
believed, was doomed to disappear.

49. As we watch the Video, consider how this clip confirms and/or
challenges our understandings of human behavior during
the holocaust.

50. Jigsaw Directions
• In groups of three, examine three areas of
new scholarship: The Role of the U.S. in the
war, The Role of Women in Nazi Germany,
The Role of Self-Interest in Germany
• Read your scholar quote and reading
• Summarize readings for your group
members
• Together discuss how these readings
reinforce and/or complicate our
understanding of human behavior during

51. Readings
“Reaping the Benefit of War” (chp 8)
“A Report on The Murder of Jews” (chp 9)
“Proving Oneself in the East” (chp 9)

52. HHB Digital Edition
• All readings on the website in a new
digital format
– Organized by chapter
– Organized by subtopics
– Paired with related video and other content
• Ebook
• Downloadable pdf

54. Refugee Nation

55. Exploring the Choices of Young
People During Critical Historical
Moments

56. Human Barometer
In the documentary Witness to the Holocaust,
Miles Lehrman, a Holocaust survivor, writes,
"A perpetrator is not the most dangerous
enemy. The most dangerous part is the
bystander because neutrality always helps the
killer."

57. Choosing to Participate
Exploring the Choices of Young People During Critical
Historic Moments
What does this all mean for other historical
moments and for our young people today?
What knowledge, skills and dispositions are
needed to be an upstander?

59. Strategies Used in this
Workshop

60. Facing History is launching a new partnership with the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC),
which offers a structured and flexible approach to planning literacy instruction. The strategies
shared during this webinar can be found both at facinghistory.org/commoncore and Facing
History’s Mini-Task Collection on the Literacy Design Collaborative CoreTools library:
coretools.ldc.org
Facing History and Ourselves
and the Literacy Design Collaborative
Facing History and Ourselves
and the Literacy Design Collaborative
Facing History and Ourselves
and the Literacy Design Collaborative

61. Where do we go from here?
● Follow-up
● Professional Development Opportunities
● Access Resources
● Evaluation