July 8




USA//NEW YORK:

Foundation helps with Holocaust teaching


Six decades later, the Holocaust remains a painful and emotionally
draining topic -- and a special challenge for middle school and high
school teachers who have to instruct students about one of the most
horrific episodes in human history.

Despite its importance, Holocaust scholarship is still just beginning to
work its way into history lessons in much of the country, and teachers
volunteering to tackle the subject often find themselves developing
courses from scratch, without much formal training.

"My own education about the Holocaust was not close to what I am providing
today in my classroom," said Kimberly Watkin, a history teacher in South
Burlington, Vermont, who offered her high school's first full-term course
on the Holocaust this past school year.

To become better versed in her subject matter, Watkin joined about 30
other educators from 11 states, plus Croatia, Lithuania and Poland, at a
five-day program on the Holocaust at Columbia University last week.

It was sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which began
in 2000 to bring schoolteachers from around the country to seminars with
top historians as part of a campaign to improve teaching about the
Holocaust.

"More often than not, you'll find that students are introduced to the
Holocaust by an English teacher who wants them to read Anne Frank's
diary," said the foundation's executive vice president, Stanlee J. Stahl.

"We did this because we discovered that teachers did not know the
history," she said.

Established in 1986, the foundation's primary mission is to provide
financial aid to non-Jews who risked arrest and possible execution to
rescue Jews during World War II. It offers care to about 1,500 surviving
rescuers around the globe.

But last week, it offered teachers lectures on the development of the Nazi
regime, refugee policies, life under German occupation, the role of
industry in the Holocaust, the efforts of rescuers and the machinery of
the system that killed 6 million Jews.

As in the past, many of the participants came from schools in towns where
there are few Jews, and where the Holocaust is generally taught over just
a few days as part of a larger U.S. or world history course, or as part of
a literature program.

In one seminar, Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor at the University of
Waterloo and the author of several books on concentration camps, posed
this question: Why did the death camps use gas for mass murder?

"Shooting," he noted, "is a perfectly fine way of killing people."

Guns, in fact, were the weapon of choice when mobile death squads began
the first large-scale massacres of Jewish families in the Soviet Union in
1941. Why switch to stationary camps and gas chambers, which were less
efficient?

The answer, van Pelt suggested, may have been that Nazi leaders were
concerned that the relentless killing of women and children up close with
a rifle would exact a psychological toll on German troops.

Gas "allowed those who took part in the operation to remain clean," he
said. "The issue is not how someone could kill, but how they could
continue to do it."

His point touched on an insight that many teachers came away with: Despite
the mechanization of mass killing, the killers themselves were human
beings -- which makes their actions all the more shocking.

"These were people much like you and I," said Mark Johnson, a teacher at
the Seattle Preparatory School in Seattle, Washington. "What is it in
humanity that allowed it to happen?"

U.S. colleges have only begun to offer a deeper curriculum on the
Holocaust in the past 10 years, said Deborah Dwork, a professor of
Holocaust studies at Clark University. She called academia's delay, "a
polite form of denial." Six states (New York, New Jersey, Florida,
California, Illinois and Mississippi) now mandate at least some teaching
of the Holocaust in public schools.

Students "don't understand how this could have happened, and it is tough
to show them, even in a nine-week course," said James Trill, a teacher at
Pioneer Valley Regional High School in Northfield, Massachusetts. "The
challenge to us is reaching these students and saying, the people who did
this are people like all of us, who have a life and have families."

(source: Associated Press)


***********************


USA//CLAIFORNIA:

Exhibit documents liberation of Holocaust victims ----Museum of Tolerance
show tells story of emancipation of death camp prisoners from viewpoint
of liberators and liberated.


Photographs of newly liberated Holocaust victims line one side of the
narrow museum hallway. Photographs of the soldiers who liberated them hang
on the opposite wall, as if in an eternal conversation with the
emancipated.

To "tell the story from the eyes of the liberators and the liberated" and
to "express the love of the liberated for their liberators" were historian
Eric Saul's goals during the year it took him to curate the Holocaust
exhibit "Liberation! Revealing the Unspeakable," on display through Sept.
30 at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Saul wanted the rescued and the rescuers to thank each other in their own
words, he said, referring to quotes -- culled from historic sources and
hours of interviews with Holocaust survivors and liberating soldiers --
that appear with the photographs.

This is "our last chance to say thank you to the millions of people who
saved the world from this onslaught of totalitarianism," said Saul, of the
aging World War II soldiers, many of whom are now in their mid-80s.

The main part of the exhibit consists of photographs arranged
chronologically in the order that the camps were liberated. Cases of
memorabilia and artifacts pepper the galleries. Two continuously running
videos -- one edited by Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford during a stint with
the Army Signal Corps -- projected onto sleek panels suspended from the
ceiling provide sound and a moving testimony of the horrors of the
Holocaust.

"Liberation!" rose out of Saul's desire to find positive messages in the
Holocaust. He has curated other exhibits that focus on the rescuers,
including "Visas for Life," which honors heroic diplomats who issued visas
and tried to help Jews escaping Nazi persecution.

Instead of focusing on the Holocaust's staggering death toll, with the
"Liberation!" exhibit Saul attempts to highlight the positive. Six million
Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but through the efforts of many
people in all walks of life -- among them soldiers, ordinary people who
hid Jews in their homes and diplomats issuing visas -- 3.5 million Jews
were saved in Europe. An additional half-million survived the camps and
death marches, Saul explained.

"The greatest moral lesson of the Holocaust is being lost because of
political fears," Saul said.

Rescue is under-reported in the Holocaust community, he said, because
people are afraid to be seen as detracting from the martyrs, the people
who suffered in the camps.

"When there are people out there who gave their lives in a truly
altruistic effort, those people have to be honored and remembered for as
long as our community is capable of doing so," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper,
associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which operates the Museum
of Tolerance.

Recognizing good and saying thank you -- a principle known as Hakarat
Hatov in Hebrew -- is "part of the instinct" in Jewish life, Cooper said.
"Our tradition basically says that the past sets the table for the
future."

The exhibit photos, which Saul had printed from negatives he selected at
the National Archives in Maryland and copied from private collections,
provide a snapshot of the last dramatic days of World War II. Without the
visuals provided by the liberating forces, he said, our understanding of
the Holocaust might be quite different.

"Had they not taken those photos, no one could have possibly believed that
the Holocaust could have taken place," Cooper said.

The photos "validate our having been there and having seen the prisoners,"
said Dr. Sus Ito, who took some of the exhibit's photographs when he
served with the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an
all-Japanese-American unit.

One of Ito's photos, taken near Waakirchen, Germany, shows a soldier from
the 442nd walking on snowy ground alongside a concentration camp victim in
his striped uniform. The two men probably didn't speak the same language,
but in the photo, they appear to have an understanding.

When Ito took the photo, he said, the regiment was moving along the road
west and south of the infamous death camp Dachau. They saw many people
coming toward them in striped uniforms, looking "rather emaciated."

"We didn't know what was going on," Ito said. The soldiers had
inadvertently come upon a death march of prisoners leaving Dachau.

While the regiment did not actually visit Dachau or its subcamps, the
irony of the situation did not escape these Japanese-American soldiers,
whose "parents were in concentration camps in the United States. It's an
amazing parallel," Ito said.

DOCUMENTATION ON FILM

In April 1945, when Gen. Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf, a subcamp of
Buchenwald in Germany, he was so alarmed by what he saw that he ordered
the Army Signal Corps to fully record on film what is now known as the
Holocaust. One photo in the exhibit shows a stoic Eisenhower witnessing a
demonstration of the way prisoners were beaten at Ohrdruf.

If Eisenhower had not had the foresight to issue those orders, Saul said,
the end of the war might not have been recorded visually.

Eisenhower also ordered residents in German towns and cities to witness
the aftermath of the atrocities in camps near their homes.

In the "Burials and Witnessing" section of the "Liberation!" exhibit,
there is a photograph of a woman in a polka-dot dress, closing her eyes
and covering her mouth as she walks through a field of dead bodies -- some
denuded and covered in cloth, some in striped prison uniforms.

Another photo, taken in Suttrop, Germany, on May 3, 1945, depicts a woman
wearing a head kerchief as she accompanies two small boys in coats through
a forest past a line of corpses. The two boys hold their hats in their
hands.

INSTRUCTIVE ARTIFACTS

In addition to photographs, "Liberation!" also includes instructive
artifacts.

"Whenever you hear or read about Nazi atrocities that sound incredibly
cruel just don't hesitate -- believe it all! As you know I used to be a
bit on the doubting side," wrote soldier Leon Singerman in a letter dated
June 16, 1945. The letter is on Nazi stationery from Mauthausen, a
concentration camp in Austria.

A large banner emblazoned with a swastika and signed with the names and
hometowns of the liberating soldiers demonstrates the ongoing nature of
Holocaust and World War II research -- an accompanying placard asks that
visitors with any knowledge of these soldiers contact the museum. To date,
the stories behind the names on the banner go untold.

"Liberation!" also depicts the stories of some concentration camp
commandants who tried to escape by disguising themselves as prisoners or
civilians.

The former commandant of a camp called Kaufring, one of the camps near
Dachau, appears in a photo in his civilian clothes, standing in the midst
of a field of corpses. The liberating forces caught him trying to escape
and forced him to be photographed. His lips are stubbornly pursed, his
hands relaxed at his side, as he looks slightly away from the camera.

La Jolla resident Susan McKnight loaned a series of photos of her father,
11th Army Division Col. Richard Seibel, who liberated Mauthausen.

The photos depict Seibel interviewing the dying Commandant Franz Ziereis
in May 1945. Ziereis had also tried to escape as a civilian but was shot
three times. The photos are of his confessions in the last minutes of his
life.

Seibel, 36 at the time, had to create order out of the chaos that reigned
when the SS left Mauthausen, McKnight said. He burned some of the barracks
to the ground to control disease and then organized the prisoners by
country -- 26 countries were represented in the prison population, she
added.

Then Seibel had to get the prisoners well enough to travel. Of the 18,000
prisoners who were there when the American forces arrived, 3,000 died
within the first week because they were "beyond saving," McKnight said.

After the war, the Seibel family occasionally would get letters to their
home in Defiance, Ohio, from people looking for relatives from the camps.
At the time, she was too young to understand, McKnight said. She was a
teenager before she really comprehended the historical contribution her
father had made.

"I understood concentration camps, but I didn't understand my father's
role," McKnight said. She would occasionally ask her father how he knew
what to do, she said, and he would simply respond: "I was just doing what
needed to be done."

"[The exhibit] touches me anew every time," said Liebe Geft, director of
the Museum of Tolerance. It is a "firebell in the night, warning us,
warning humanity."

(source: The Daily Breeze)