Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies(FSWC) Educator Daniella spent this morning at a private school in Toronto for two Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust workshops for Grade 10 History classes.  The boys were just starting the study of World War II and had been focusing on the Nazi rise to power so they had a ton of questions about everything. 

One student wanted to know why people don't focus more on the Gypsy (Roma) people or homosexuals that were also killed during the period of the Holocaust. Daniella explained that the Final Solution was about the complete annihilation of the Jewish people and that was why the focus is more on that aspect of the Holocaust.  Daniella explained that the other millions of people who were also killed were often more of a by-product of the Final Solution.

Students also spent a lot of time looking at the before and after maps of the Jewish population in Europe, inspecting how the populations of certain countries like Poland were decimated (from over 3 million to 120,000) yet by percentage Germany didn't lose as many (from 240,000 to 18,000). Daniella was able to explain that this was due, in part, to death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka that were located in Nazi-occupied Poland and were used to eliminate the Jewish populations en masse.                                                               

In the second workshop, the boys also had a lot of questions surrounding how the Nazis identified who was Jewish versus Aryan. Daniella spent quite a bit of time on the Nuremberg Race Chart, as most of the boys had never seen it. There were questions initially regarding conversion and having blonde hair and blue eyes. Daniella explained that it was sometimes possible for Jewish people who looked “Aryan” to be able to hide with fake names, but that the goal of separating Jewish people with Aryan people was based more on someone’s background and bloodline.

Feedback from the students as well as the teachers was very positive - one of the teachers pointed out that FSWC’s workshops are a good complement to the Grade 10 History curriculum.

Today was also our first day in Sault Ste. Marie with the Tour for Humanity. There were a lot of teachers who visited the Tour for Humanity throughout the day and both Vice Principals and the Principal also attended and without exception they all expressed amazement about the program and FSWC's ability to address the issues and questions raised by students. FSWC Educator Elena taught 5 workshops on the Canadian Experience to Grades 7, 8, and 10 students, as this school is a Grade 7-12 middle school/high school combination. In the Canadian Experience program, students learn about a variety of difficult topics in Canadian History including slavery, the Indian Residential Schools System, the voyage of the SS St. Louis and the systemic internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Following a review of the past, current issues including cyber bullying and modern-day examples of intolerance are examined and discussed. (The school also very kindly provided lunch for Elena prepared by their culinary arts students). 

The majority of each workshop was spent discussing the Holocaust because it was something that many students were fascinated with.  This led to some very interesting conversations in the first half of the day.  The first group had one student with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Nazis. One thing he wanted to know more about was why Jewish people didn't try to fight back, especially once they were being loaded onto the trains and deported from the ghettos.  Elena had other students answer this question for him - his classmates brought up the fact that people were being starved and were weak and that they didn't have any weapons and the Nazis were always prepared to shoot anyone who got out of line. One young lady astutely noted that most people didn't know where they were going, so fighting back would have seemed dangerous and stupid to many. Elena rounded out the conversation by pointing out how people, even on their way to the concentration camps, had hope. They thought that they could survive best by doing what they were told. There were also lots of examples of people who fought back in various ways and not only were they severely punished and often killed, so were their whole families.  Elena also took time to discuss a couple of the major uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto and Sobibor concentration camps. In both of these situations, the Jewish people who fought back knew exactly what was in store for them and were desperate to take action before it was too late. This is part of why the Nazis took so much care to convince Jewish people entering the death camps that they were safe as long as they followed orders, while in reality the majority were being immediately sent to their deaths. 

Sault Ste. Marie's population has a strong representation of Aboriginal students in the schools.  One of the most powerful moments of the day for Elena was when one young woman shared that her grandfather was in a residential school and this led to other students talking about how this policy affected their own families.  At the same time, Elena found most of the students knew very little about residential schools so there were lots of questions about how and why the abuse there occurred. One student told the class that rape was used as form of punishment against students. Elena jumped in and tried to balance the fact that there was a very real trend of sexual abuse inflicted on students in the schools with the fact that we need to understand exactly what that means, in context.  Although many school authorities did abuse their power and the students in their care, it wasn't something that the government condoned or was part of the official policy. Elena also pointed out that a lot of the time younger students were abused by older students and the schools failed to protect them. Unfortunately, when cases of sexual abuse did come out, a lot of the time the schools didn't try to find justice for the students and it was often swept under the rug. People who were known abusers sometimes continued to work in the schools for decades.