Discussion
This is more suitable for a longer programme. Again sensitivity is vital since participants will often be talking personally. Discussion involving the Holocaust requires serious research and preparation. The following suggestions are discussions based around the idea of resistance.
Some of the examples of resistance are listed below.
1) Which category of resistance do they fall into?
2) Is it fair or possible to measure the different kinds of resistance against one another?
3) What other instances of resistance do you know of, and can you think of other possible ways?
- Prayer groups that met inside certain ghettos despite the threat of severe punishment if discovered.
- Efforts to save a Sefer Torah from burning synagogues. This occurred at Wlodowa when the Rabbi burned to death in his efforts to save a Sefer Torah.
- Chasidim who danced and sang in religious ecstasy until the moment of death.
- Kiddush Hashem - deliberately dying, being killed, or committing suicide rather than dying in the way planned by the Nazis e.g. Dr Josef Parnas, the head of the Lvov Judenrat (see below) who chose to be tortured and die rather than hand over details of specific Jews in his town.
- The famous story of the Jewish educationalist of Warsaw, Janucz Korczak, who in the time of the ghetto organised the orphanages. When the deportations began, he was given the option of fleeing to the Aryan side of the city and relative safety. Instead he chose to go with his orphans to Treblinka so that they would not be totally alone at the time of their deaths.
- Collecting and distributing news to inform people of the situation e.g. a group gathered in Lodz to systematically monitor radio broadcasts.
- Artists who ridiculed the Nazis and the collaborators. The jokes that were told throughout the period encouraged and raised morale by poking fun.
A more controversial (and current) discussion concerns the role that others could have played in helping the Jews resist. One group is the Allies - why didn't they bomb Auschwitz and the other death camps? But a subject that is in the news at the moment is the Catholic Church. They have often been criticised for not speaking out during the war and since the war they have been criticised for not recognising their inaction during the war. The pope recently released a document which admitted that the church had not done enough to help the Jews, but many have said even this does not go far enough. Get hold of recent newspaper articles on the subject. Did the Catholic Church do enough during the war? Can people today apologise for the sins of their predecessors?
One of the strangest and least understood chapters in the history of the Holocaust is the role of the Jewish Councils (the Judenrat), the Nazi-sponsored Jewish ghetto governments in each city or town. The Jewish Councils have often been condemned wholesale for willingly playing the role assigned to them by the Nazis. But the truth is not that simple. Many councils co-operated with the Nazis because they believed that was the best way to save more Jewish lives. But other council members were more concerned with saving their own lives. What was the role of the Judenrat? Could they have acted differently and would it have helped the fate of the Jews? Some of the Jewish Councils acted in truly heroic ways, but did this mean more lives were saved?
Other Materials
There are many slides, audio cassettes and videos on Holocaust topics. There are a number of videos you can show on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as well as on other areas of resistance. There is a film about the rebellion in Sobibor called 'Escape from Soboibor'. For more titles or ideas there are a couple of places you can call for help, advice, and resources. They are JPMP on 0181 446 8020, or the Holocaust Education Trust on 020 7222 6822.
Exhibition
You could borrow or make an exhibition that could be displayed in a public area of the school for a short period. This is a good way to enable a large number of people to discover more about the Holocaust in their own time.
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