Teacher gets tips on relaying Holocaust
Lake educator attends D.C. event on teaching kids about WWII crime
South Lake High School teacher Marna Lucillo understands the devastation of the Holocaust — three family members didn’t survive the concentration camp in Auschwitz and one died in Mauthausen. But for her students at the Groveland school, the genocide of about 6 million European Jews during World War II by Nazi Germany is considered “ancient history,” said the educator, who started her 15th school year in Lake County last week.
Lucillo, 58, is an innovative learning specialist who also teaches government and economics to seniors. She wanted to figure out how to include the Holocaust in her lessons and got ideas while attending the three-day Belfer National Conference for Educators in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Museum. This school year, she plans to discuss the parallels between the suffering endured by the Jewish community during the Holocaust to modern-day polarizing issues such as the treatment of undocumented immigrants in today’s political climate.
“A lot of the stuff is very current
so you can show how past rhetoric is very much the same — things haven’t changed, maybe it’s not the Jewish population and maybe you won’t see 6 million Jews, but you’re seeing other races going through the same thing,” said Lucillo, whose expenses were covered by the conference.
For students to effectively grasp the magnitude of what historians have called a watershed event in the history of humanity, she said, it takes more than reading summaries and photos in a textbook.
“You don’t show them the concentration camps because it’s kinda like when they see violent games over and over, it doesn’t mean anything to them,” Lucillo said.
To teach the subject on a human-interest level, she suggests students should read the diaries of Holocaust victims and hear from any remaining local survivors.
Helping kids understand the Holocaust is a goal of the state. In 1994, the Legislature mandated that public schools include education about the Holocaust in the curriculum, among other subjects such as African American history and the women’s suffrage movement.
The measure’s intent is to not only help students be aware of the dangerous effects of racism, prejudice and stereotypes, but also to teach them to be respectful toward their peers, said resource teacher Mitchell Bloomer of the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida in Maitland.
“They don’t want the schools to just say ‘OK, kids — there was thing called the Holocaust and it was really bad,’ ” he said. “This is a more common feature in human history than we’d like to admit, and there many iterations of it.”
Florida has no suggested grade level for Holocaust education and teachers of any subject can present the materials in the classroom.
“That doesn’t mean that anybody is suggesting kindergartners should learn about the Holocaust,” Bloomer said. “It means that you can be teaching about the value of belonging to an inclusive
“This is a more common feature in human history than we’d like to admit, and there many iterations of it.”
Mitchell Bloomer, Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida
community, about the virtues of being respectful and kind.”
At the D.C. conference, teachers also were provided with training that enables students to think critically about their roles in society if they witness injustice.
“They talk about bystanders and how it’s really not their fault — but everyone has a choice — so the idea is to get the kids to understand those choices,” Lucillo said. “Whether you choose to do or not do, you made a choice.”