On a recent morning, a group of seventh-graders was absorbed in a video of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.
“Why did he win?” asked teacher Tracy Sockalosky. She guided the discussion to the importance of remembrance, a theme reflected in Wiesel’s book “Night,” which the class read as part of an eight-week unit on the Holocaust.
Sockalosky, a 39-year-old teacher at Wilson Middle School in Natick, Massachu-setts, was one of 25 educators from around the world who traveled to Poland in January for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The five-day trip included workshops at Warsaw’s Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, visits to Jewish historical sites and meetings with survivors.
A webcast produced during the trip, “Auschwitz: The Past Is Present Virtual Experience,” will be available to teachers and high school students on May 13 through the Shoah Foundation’s partnership with Discovery Education, a company that streams educational content.
While no one knows how many schools in the United States teach about the Holocaust, it seems to have become more of a mainstream phenomenon, even in communities that lack significant Jewish populations.
Five states, including California, have some type of mandate to teach about the Holocaust in public K-12 schools. Others encourage Holocaust education or make recommendations. But approach, quality and goals vary dramatically, those in the field say.
And with the last cohort of survivors in their final years, Holocaust education, which once relied on classroom visits from survivors, is in a period of transition.
“We’re on the cusp of a shift,” when it will no longer be easy to find survivors to speak directly with students, says Roger Brooks, president of Facing History and Ourselves, a Boston-based nonprofit that combines teaching Holocaust history and readings that explore ethics and questions of civic responsibilities.
In anticipation of the shift to a post-survivor age, USC’s Shoah Foundation has collected more than 52,000 survivor testimonies in the past 20 years.
Testimonies can’t be presented to students on their own, however, educators caution. Instead, they must be supplemented with lessons about the context of anti-Semitism and the history that led to the Holocaust.
Sockalosky acknowledges that her classroom material can be challenging for seventh-graders. But she says the experience of standing with survivors at the gates of Auschwitz has deepened her commitment to reaching students at their level.
“I have to find a way to make learning about the Holocaust not just another historical event we study,” Sockalosky says. “It’s not just about the history; it’s about the human experience.”