South Carolina Voices: Lessons from the Holocaust

Teaching Lesson One

Materials—Handout 1A: Imagine This and Handout 1B: Fact Not Fantasy

Key Terms--anti-Semitism, synagogue

PROCEDURE

Motivate: Read Overview I and summarize for students. Then distribute Handout 1A. Have students discuss the reading, using the questions that follow.

1. Do you think the events described in this story could happen to anyone in the community where you live? Why or why not?

2. Do you think this could happen anywhere? If so, where?

If students say that such events could not happen in their community, have them give reasons for their opinions. What would prevent such events from happening? (public opinion and public protest, laws, police, government leaders) What rights do private citizens have in the United States that protect them from being evicted from their homes or arrested? (Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, and so on)

Develop: After a brief discussion of Handout 1A, tell students that the next accounts they will read are facts, not fiction. They are part of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors Trude (pronounced Tru-dee) Heller and Pincus (pronounced Pink-us) Kolendar. Like all of the survivors students will read about in this guide, they live in South Carolina. Trude lives in Greenville and Pincus in Charleston. The goal of this guide is to focus on the Holocaust experiences of South Carolinans to personalize the experience for students. As you use other lessons from this guide, consider locating and marking the cities in South Carolina where the survivors and liberators live. Students can tag the cities with the names of the survivors and liberators. Use string on a globe or a world map to connect the areas of Europe where these lessons take place and South Carolina.

As students read the lessons about Trude, Pincus, and the other survivors, the class can create a lifeline for each person or place all the survivors on a single line using a different color for each. A lifeline is a string or rope stretched and tied between two points on which slips of paper representing the events in a person's life are hooked. Paperclips work well for this. Knots can be tied in the string or rope to represent the years involved. To further personalize these events have students place events from the lives of members of their own families or from this period in history on the lifeline also.

Locate Vienna, Austria, and Bochnia, Poland, on a map of Europe. As you study the other lessons, locate the sites named in the survivors' testimonies. Review the definitions of the key terms for this lesson. Stress that the experiences of Trude and Pincus were not unusual, but quite typical of the first contacts many Jews had with the Nazis. In 1938, when the Nazis took over Austria, Trude's parents were merchants, leading a comfortable, middle class life. They lived in an area of Vienna occupied by many Jewish families. Pincus, who lived in Poland, came from a very religious, poor family.

Distribute Handout 1B. Use the following questions to discuss the reading:

1. What changes did Hitler's takeover of Austria make in Trude's life? What evidence can you find that some Austrians supported or benefitted from Nazi hatred of Jews?

2. What did Trude mean by the statement that we moved to a place where "people like us" could live? What effect do you think this experience had on the way Trude thought about herself and her family?

3. How did anti-Semitism affect the way Pincus lived before 1939 when the war began? After the war began and the Germans conquered Poland? What evidence can you find that prejudice against Jews existed among Polish people before the rise of Nazism?

4. Do you think this experience changed the way Trude's and Pincus's friends and neighbors thought about them? How other Austrians and Poles thought about Jews? Through discussion, students should recognize that this treatment was a deliberate attempt to isolate and humiliate Trude, Pincus and other Jews, to make them outsiders or different from their classmates, and to encourage non-Jews to think of them as inferior.

5. How would you feel if you were suddenly forced to give up your home or watch your parents lose their jobs because of their race or religion? What response could you make if such treatment were official government policy? What can Americans do if someone attempts to take away their property? Why couldn't either family protest their treatment? Emphasize that the actions of the Nazis were government policy or had the unofficial approval of government leaders, thus the choice of responses was very limited.

Conclude by speculating on the types of governments existing in Poland and Austria at this time which allowed such actions to take place. Explain that students will learn more about the governments of countries occupied by the Nazis in Lesson Two.

Extend: In recent years both anti-Semitism and many kinds of hate crimes have risen sharply in the United States. Hate crimes can be defined as crimes motivated by a victim's race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual persuasion. Such crimes take many forms from harassment and vandalism such as spray painting swastikas on synagogues, to cross-burnings, arson, bombings, and murder. Experts think that America's economic problems, particularly the recession of the early 1990s, may be one cause of the increase in bigotry and violence against minorities. But experts also say there is a strong link between such crimes and the values perpetrators learn from parents, friends, and community. The most extreme violence arises from prejudices learned in childhood and reinforced by family, friends, and society. Students can bring to class newspaper or news magazine articles describing hate crimes in South Carolina or in other parts of the country.

Ask the class to imagine that they were friends or acquaintances of the perpetrators of hate crimes or observers or witnesses to such crimes. Explore what they might have done to stop the crime or prevent a reoccurence of such a crime. What punishment would they recommend for juveniles who commit acts of vandalism as hate crimes?

HANDOUT 1A—IMAGINE THIS*

It's late in the afternoon on a weekday. You are home after school watching television. You hear people making loud noises outside on the street. So you get up and look out the window. You see people being marched down your street at gun point by men in uniforms. The people are your neighbors. You also recognize some of the men in uniform. One of them works at the grocery store where your family shops. One of the people being marched down the street is the lady from the corner house with her two children.

"What's going on?" you call out to people walking quickly by on the street.

"Never mind," says one.

"Don't ask," says someone else.

"It doesn't concern you," says a third person.

Then the street is deserted again and it's very quiet. The next day at school you notice several empty seats in your English class. By the end of the week more children are missing from your school. None of your friends seem to know where any of them have gone. Then one of your teachers disappears, replaced by a substitute. No one can offer any explanation. "Never mind," they say. "A new teacher will come. Maybe she'll give less homework."

Then one Saturday you call a friend to see about going to a movie. The phone rings and rings. Finally a recorded message comes over the line, "Sorry, this number is no longer in service." You hurry over to your friend's house. The door is open. Strangers are carrying away furniture and other things that belong to your friend's family. Your friend is nowhere around. You try to enter the house, but a police officer stops you.

"Sorry," he says. "This house is off limits. It now belongs to the government."

"But why?" you say.

"The people who lived here have been taken away," he says.

"What did they do wrong?" you ask.

"People like them, they didn't have to do anything wrong to get in trouble. Now if I were you, I'd move along and not ask any more questions."

*Adapted from In Their Words, a compilation of testimony from survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, their liberators and their protectors, produced by the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, Inc., Florida International University, North Miami, FL. 33181 copyrighted 1983.

HANDOUT 1B—FACT NOT FANTASY

Trude in Austria

(Trude Heller was born in Vienna in 1922. She was 15 years old in March 1938 when Hitler took over Austria. In the reading below she describes how life changed for her and her parents after the Nazis gained control of her country.)

The first week that Hitler took over they came and got our car. An Austrian Storm Trooper carrying a rifle came to our apartment. He knocked on the door and said, "Car keys." And that was that. We handed them over.

A little while later a non-Jewish couple wanted our apartment. A uniformed official came with the people who wanted the apartment. He told us whatever is not out in six hours stays and if you're not out by then, you get killed. So my mother went to look for an apartment. My father went to get boxes and I started packing. Within six hours we were out. Of course, we had to leave almost everything behind. There were several buildings that were not so nice anymore where people like us could move. We moved to one of those places. The people there were mostly Jews who had been displaced from their homes.

Pincus in Poland

(Pincus Kolender was born in the city of Bochnia, Poland in 1926. He had two brothers and a sister. Bochnia had a large Jewish community with many synagogues, Jewish houses of worship, and many schools for Jewish children. Although his family always experienced some anti-Semitism, his early life was happy. In the reading below, Pincus describes how life began to change when he was 12.)

Before the war, there was always anti-Semitism but we managed. There were certain businesses that Jews were not permitted to own. My father was a war veteran. He had served in the army in World War I. He applied for a business license, but he couldn't get it because he was Jewish. They didn't state it, but we knew it was the reason.

My father, who was an accountant, worked for a clothing store. By 1938 anti-Semitism was very strong. My father had a beard as many religious Jews did at that time. The owner of the clothing store told my father to shave it off. He wouldn't do it, so he lost his job. He opened a grocery store in 1938 and ran it until 1940 when the war started.

In 1939 everything stopped. All the schools were closed to us. Schooling was forbidden for Jewish kids. All the synagogues were closed. When 1940 came, we had to close our business. Jews weren't allowed to have any businesses. Once the business was closed, it was tough, very tough. It was hard to get food. We had no money, but somehow we managed.

Overview II—Hitler's Rise

Back to Overview I—A Short History of Anti-Semitism