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Does the Holocaust Matter Today?
Oprah's National High School Essay Contest invites students reading Elie Wiesel's Night to respond to the question "Why is Elie Wiesel's book Night relevant today?” Whether you're encouraging secondary students to enter the essay contest or exploring the Holocaust with students at another grade level, the following resources can help students recognize the significance that the Holocaust still carries in the contemporary world.
The ReadWriteThink lesson plan Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel’s Night (M-S) outlines strategies that teachers can use to focus exploration of Wiesel's memoir on the specific questions and ideas that they bring to the text.
Begin your unit with "A Silent Warm-Up" (M-S-C), from Classroom Notes Plus, which introduces the difficult subject of the Holocaust by asking students to think about related issues on their own before we have a whole class discussion.
Answering questions about the Holocaust can be even more challenging in the elementary classroom. "A Letter to My Children: Historical Memory and the Silences of Childhood" (E) from the NCTE book Teaching for a Tolerant World: Grades K-6 explains how one father answers his children when they ask, "What are Nazis? Are they bad guys?". The Talking Points article
"Eric's Journey" (E) demonstrates how a reading of Lois Lowry's Number the Stars inspires a student to explore the Holocaust in his own writing.
Investigating the Holocaust: A Collaborative Inquiry Project (M), another ReadWriteThink lesson plan, focuses on student-centered inquiryas students explore a range of print and nonprint resources through extensive online inquiry activities. The lesson plan culminates in publishing the group’s findings in topic-based newspapers.
For an extensive unit on the Holocaust, read the English Journal article "Telling the Tale: Sharing Elie Wiesel's Night with Middle School Readers" (M-S), which explains how the author uses Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's autobiography, Night, in a nine-week unit on tolerance and prejudice.
Another extensive exploration, "Voices of the Holocaust:
A New Course" (C) from Teaching English in the Two-Year College describes a course that involves reading five survivors' autobiographies, hearing four survivor speakers, one of whom was one of the authors, and hearing a speaker who had researched the murder and victimization of her family during the Holocaust.
"Forgetful Memory and Images of the
Holocaust" (C) from College English Volume 66, Number 4, March 2004 explores how photographic images of atrocity work to undo some of our assumptions about how historical narratives work, and disturb the cultural memory that allows us to write ourselves into history. It suggests a way of reading these photographic images that yields something that might be called “forgetful memory,” aspects of the event at the center of the photo that cannot be integrated into the narrative we build to contain it.
Celebrating Award-Winning Books
This week the American Library Association announced their much-anticipated award winners for 2006, including the Caldecott and Newbery Medals and the Michael L. Printz and Coretta Scott King Awards. If you're exploring Holocaust issues, be sure to check out Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, a Newbery Honor book for 2006. For related classroom activities and resources, see the ReadWriteThink calendar entry on the award announcements (E-M-S).
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