It’s one thing to describe the horrors of Kristallnacht. It’s another to witness the photographs of the devastation. But it’s quite something else to hear the testimony of a man who remembers the visceral crunching of the glass beneath his bike tires as he cycled to school and past shattered shop windows, while a platoon of Nazis forced an old Jew to pick up the shards of glass, one by one.
The ability to impart the overarching messages of the Holocaust as well as the touching personal details such as those is the goal of “Echoes and Remembrance,” a unique program aimed at high school educators.
The course is the result of a collaboration between Yad Vashem, Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League. Eighteen Bay Area educators took in the most recent local offering, which was sponsored by the ADL and Holocaust Center of Northern California early in December.
“In one lesson we saw a piece on ghettos. In a traditional high school textbook, ghettoes might be omitted or a sentence or two. What [this course] is able to do is extend knowledge and information and then particularize it down to individuals living in the ghetto,” said course participant Evan Goldberg of the Alameda County Office of Education.
In an era when attention spans are waning, the “Echoes” coursework bounces between mediums. Teachers will lecture, open the class for discussion, hand out worksheets and cue up multiple DVD clips of Holocaust survivors that usually top out at four minutes apiece.
“What I like so much about this particular curriculum is that it uses survivor testimony so when you can no longer invite survivors into the classroom, you can still have a personal link and kids can see people who went through the Shoah,” said Beverly Pinto, a veteran teacher of Holocaust courses who has worked at both Tiburon’s Kol Shofar and San Francisco’s Beth Sholom.
“What’s novel about it is that it’s succinct. It’s put together for the educator. They don’t have to start scrambling into different areas of history, literature, letters and newspapers. It’s all included in one program and really saves a teacher a tremendous amount of legwork.”
Nina Grotch, the ADL’s regional education director, noted that participating teachers leave with complimentary course materials valued at $100. While the course provides enough material to teach an entire quarter in a Holocaust class, teachers can easily pick and choose the materials they prefer, materials that can help in assembling a class that lasts only a week or even a day or two.
Grotch hopes that “Echoes” will help to end what she considers hurried or slipshod teaching of Holocaust-era history.
“At ADL we get so many calls about Holocaust teaching gone awry; kids doing Hitler salutes and drawing swastikas. These are some of the goriest pictures you’ll see in history class. Without doing a very comprehensive job, they look like great images of power and an idolization of Hitler,” she said.
Pinto couldn’t wait to put the new curriculum into action.
“I’ve been teaching [this subject] for years and I came home Sunday so excited,” she said.
“It was great; there were so many non-Jewish teachers there and teachers from public schools.”