Today Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center facilitated a Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust workshop at a Catholic secondary school in Brampton. The workshop was organized by a teacher whose father is an Compassion to Action alumni and former Superintendent with the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board. Although initially designated for the Grade 10 history classes, the workshop was later opened up to all interested classes and students. The result was over 300 students and multiple staff and administration listening intently in the school cafeteria. After learning about the Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust, survivor Max Eisen spoke to the group for over an hour and shared his remarkable story with the Grades 9-12 students. Being such a large group of high school students made it difficult for questions, however, at the end of the workshop students came up to ask both Max and FSWC Educator Daniella questions and to thank us for coming to their school. 

FSWC’s Education Department will be returning to this same school in December for a series of 4 Women’s Rights workshop, each of which will be attended by more than 100 students.

The Tour for Humanity was back in the greater Toronto area today. FSWC Educator Elena spent the day at a public school working with Grades 7 and 8 students. Elena was very impressed with the knowledge many students possessed about the Holocaust. The teacher who arranged our visit herself was very passionate about Holocaust education and she had previously done a course that took students to important sites of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. 

A student in the first workshop was the stand-out student from the day. He was clearly very interested in the history of World War II and knew about details many high school students have no knowledge of, like the fact that the “Aryan race” allegedly came from Northern India. He also had several thoughtful questions about Germany under Nazism, including what happened to Jewish people who were married to Germans? 

The school has also obviously done a good job of covering topics relating to Canadian history, especially the Residential School System. One young woman asked how the “60’s Scoop” fit in with the residential schools so I explained that there was a whole constellation of laws relating to the assimilation and “modernization” of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. This included placing children with white families to encourage them to integrate into the mainstream. 

One last interesting moment from the day came about when the teacher with the third group of students told us about another school she used to teach at in Toronto where there was a large Roma population. She explained that there was a large influx of Romani people from Hungary over the last decade because of violence and continued intolerance towards Roma communities there. She shared the fact that one young woman told her about her school back in Hungary, where her teacher would call her a “stupid dirty Roma” and would routinely smack her across the face. The teacher was clearly very affected by this story and she was saddened that the student was so surprised to be treated with kindness by teachers here in Toronto.

Overall it was a great day filled with lots of interesting perspectives.