This lesson plan uses group work, creative writing, and multimedia to teach subjects including History, Literature, Civics, Social and Political Education, Philosophy, Language etc. It is also useful in discussions about multiculturalism, war and peace, the Second World War, crimes against humanity, genocide and holocausts (e.g. the Jewish Holocaust), modern European history, moral and ethical issues, struggle for survival, etc.

It is a Austro-Hungarian tradition for schools to take group photographs of graduating classes, and post them in shops around town and throughout the school for everyone to take pride in. If your school have tableaux or a yearbook of a class that graduated a few generations earlier, you may have a great project at hand. In this project, your students will choose one tableau to research by finding the people in the class, contacting and interviewing them, and making a film based on what they found. The focus of the questions is up to you.

Studenti byli již poučeni o základních pojmech ( židovská kultura, zvyky, tradice, dějiny Židů v naší zemi a ve světě, Židé a druhá světová válka, koncentrační tábory, perzekuce, zákazy, odpovědi na časté dotazy). Již dříve jsem vypracovala vlastní studijní materiály a pracovní listy na základě mnohaletého studia této tématiky i s využitím materiálů ze seminářů Památníku Terezín. (2 hodiny). Nyní si mají uvědomit, že za statistikou se skrývají osudy lidí dosud žijících okolo nás.

The Bosnian-Serb siege of Sarajevo, from spring 1993 until winter 1996, was the longest in modern history. With electricity, water and food supplies cut off and only sporadically supplied, with 11,541 citizens shot by snipers or killed by mortars, Sarajevans had to depend on each other.

This final exam project culminates a semester of study and storytelling about Jewish life in Central Europe and the Holocaust that started with students presenting their own stories in picture collages, viewing Centropa films, and now creating films about Holocaust survivors. Using Centropa’s database, students choose one Centropa interviewee to research, reading the entire interview, viewing all of their photographs, reading Study Guide articles for historical context and other background.

Students bring in a family photograph they like. This can be from a vacation, a holiday celebration, a family life cycle event, any photograph that includes the student. In class, students look through the Centropa database to find a photograph that looks similar to the one they brought in – people might be posed similarly to the people in their picture, or doing the same thing, etc. Then they read about that photograph, as well as the Centropa interview to find out about the life of that survivor.

Students are each given a short, multimedia film from Centropa to watch. As they watch – they may need to watch it more than once – they are to write down words that important to the story: events (e.g., Kristallnacht), values (e.g., loyalty), or anything important to the person whose story they are watching (e.g., a violin, sports, family). Once they are clear about the story, they go to the Wordle website (http://www.wordle.net) and make a word cloud that accurately represents the story they watched.

In this lesson, which I adapt to different courses, students explore Centropa’s web page with Jewish recipes curated by Jayne Cohen, and read In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes women gathered while in the Nazi camps. As a way to learn about pre-war Jewish culture, and to bring that learning from the intellect to their senses, students are asked to find a recipe that they then cook with their parents.

Students in my class and Melanie Shaul’s class in Hadera, Israel, read the autobiography of Dr. Richard Bugajer, My Shadowlife. Melanie and I met his widow in Vienna, on a Centropa summer trip, where we designed this project. Each class read the entire book and then made PowerPoint presentations about each chapter – and then sent their presentations to each other to see how students in another country would understand the same story.