Regina teachers gain insights on Holocaust tour
Students can expect new approaches after evocative visits to death camps
When four Regina teachers visited Germany and Poland to learn about the history of the Holocaust, each carried a personal letter from a survivor.
Michelle Phair’s was a little different from the rest. Vera Schiff ’s letter did not tell her life story.
Instead, “She went on for two pages to talk about ‘how do we teach about the Holocaust?’ It really comes back to this whole idea of story,” said Phair, an ethics professor at O’Neill High School.
Phair and three other teachers from the Regina Catholic School Division — O’Neill colleague Ada Paez, Milos Menhart from Michael A. Riffel and Patrick Reed from Dr. Martin LeBoldus — took a 15-day tour in July of Germany and Poland, along with teachers and 27 students from Toronto.
They also took a four-day course at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Toronto.
In visiting five concentration camps and numerous other Holocaust memorials, the group learned that no survivor’s story is the same.
Schiff was 16 when her family was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic in 1942. She was the only survivor.
Anita Ekstein was a child in Poland when a stranger agreed to smuggle her out of the ghetto.
She spent the rest of the war in hiding.
“What got me going was the fact that one person had enough guts to save her,” said Paez, who opened her letter from Ekstein while at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“She’s a mother, she’s a grandma, she’s a great-grandma. All of that was because of one person. That shows what people can do when they choose to,” added Paez.
“Sometimes we have a tendency to forget that there were so many unsung heroes.”
The prisoners at Majdanek, near Lublin in Poland, quietly resisted the Nazis. Instructed to design and build a statue, which is topped by three eagles, they included ashes of their deceased in its base, which another inmate smuggled out of the crematorium.
A massive pile of ashes is encased in a mausoleum at that same camp, which the teachers learned is so intact that it could be operational within a week or two.
At the largely dismantled Ravensbruck, north of Berlin, tour guides kept the memories of the places alive with their stories.
“It’s 70, 75 years ago, that these things happened and they’re not going to be part of living memory for much longer, so it is important that we keep this as part of our human experience, as part of what we know, that we learn from it,” said Phair.
“There are a lot of parallels of things that are happening in our day and age when we think of intolerance and racism, the whole idea of finding scapegoats for our problems … that we look for groups that are responsible and then separate them out.”
That is what happened in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, and something Paez plans to teach to her Grade 11 history students.
In her Holocaust lessons, “I always concentrated more on what the Nazis did,” said Paez. “But I think I’m going to concentrate more now on how they made a path to it, because … it’s not something that happens overnight; it takes a while and sometimes you don’t realize what’s happening until it’s late.”
“It didn’t just start,” Phair agreed.
“These camps didn’t just spring up and all of a sudden we’re putting people on trains to the gas chambers. … It was all about propaganda. It wasn’t about vilifying anyone to begin with. It was about ‘we want to make our country better again.’ ”
“We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so teaching the kids to see things and foretell when somebody is brainwashing them,” said Paez.