A PBS Movie “America and the Holocaust” Teachers Guide and More About the Film.

Fascinating materials from the BBC.

This is a really cool site to get on and snoop around.  Steven Spielberg has amassed a collection of films, not all in English, that with a little creativity, you can wrap a whole lesson around.  I found a great one on Hidden Children in English from 1945.

Lessons plans for Elie Weisel's NIGHT. 

• Listen in as Oprah Winfrey interviews Elie Weisel in 2000.
  
  
• Check out The Elie Weisel  Foundation for Humanity
  
  
• Three videos which can be found in the LTPS Media Center’s collection are:
  
  
• “Elie Wiesel Goes Home” is described as a “compelling and touching film” that follows Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wiesel, as he returns to Sighet, the village of his birth.    He also visits Auschwitz and Birkenau.   This is the story of how one Holocaust Survivor evolved into someone who speaks out for victims of oppression all over the world.
  
  

• “First Person Singular Elie Wiesel”  In this PBS Home Video, the celebrated author of “Night” reveals how he reconstructed his life after surviving the horrors of Auschwitz to enter a world of writing, teaching, and human rights activism.  In Boston, New York, Paris and Jerusalem he sums up a life of seeking to understand human behavior.  His discussion of the events of September 11, add relevance for today.  PBS.org has curriculum that they suggest for viewing the film as a companion to the novel “Night”
  
  

• It may be useful to introduce other survivors as part of the literary study of  ”Night”, The Last Days, a film by James Moll.  Presented by Steven Spielberg and The Shoah Foundation, it is an Academy Award Winning best Documentary Feature.  The film traces the experiences of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors - a grandmother, a teacher, a businessman, an artist and a U.S. Congressman- as they return from the Unities States to their hometowns and to the ghettos and concentration camps in which they were imprisoned. Also Included is newly-discovered historical footage and a rare interview with a former Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. 
  
  

Surviving Auschwitz: Five Personal Journeys follows the lives of five Holocaust survivors before, during, and after their deportation to Auschwitz and other camps.  First person video testimonies, are accompanied by interactive maps, photographs and biographical profiles.  Designed for grades 8 - 12.

"The Wave" is an excellent movie.  It can be viewed to demonstrate how quickly some people are willing to relinquish their individuality and rights, for the power inherent in the larger group.  Sadly, it also brings to mind the mentality of the gang, something I seem to be hearing more and more about.

In a California high school class, Social Studies Teacher Mr Ross, can not provide an answer when one of his students asks, “How could this happen?” during a lesson on the Holocaust.  Ross devises an experiment that has to be cut short as the class quickly learns how such a thing as the Holocaust could happen, even in 1967.  This is a true and scary story.  Lesson plans are provided by a Teachers Guide to the Holocaust.

Although time consuming, watching these movies has become a fascination for me.  The movie, "The Writing on the Wall" takes place in modern day, when a few boys decide to paint Nazi graffiti on a local rabbi’s home, and the town’s synagogue.  Although many members of the community would like to see the boys severely punished, the Rabbi suggests an alternative.  He offers to instruct the boys about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust and the significance of their act.  Through the Rabbi’s lessons and special outings he arranges for his students, your students learn too.  Also appropriate for Middle School.

Understand Holocaust and Resistance through lessons in which,  students reflect on the Holocaust from the point of view of those who actively resisted Nazi persecution. After reviewing the history of the Holocaust, in order to understand the legal and bureaucratic authority with which the Nazis systematically enforced their policies, students debate the options for resistance and its likely outcomes.

Warsaw Uprising - Better for more mature readers.

Learn about Varian Fry, an American who traveled to France in 1940 to set up a rescue committee in the People Section of this Website and then review the Lesson Plans available in association with his Autobiography: Assignment Rescue.

Nicholas Winton, a regular guy, an ordinary man, managed to save some 660 Czechoslovakian children from becoming Hitler’s victims.  View the DVD (have tissues available) with your class and review the enclosed study guide.  Both are available in the LHS Center for Humanitarian and Affective Instruction.

Review the people section and resistance section for more about individual resisters and group resistance.