In this cross-cultural project with students in North Carolina and Slovakia, our students are paired with a penfriend based on shared interests. The NC students wrote letters, but penfriends will get to know each other through electronic correspondence, as well. So each class can get to know something about our towns, we exchanged videos made by others about our cities – we sent the introduction to Greensboro sent by a local college.

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.

The class watched Centropa’s film Love on a Paper Airplane as an introduction to the love story of Judit Kinszki’s parents, and the early modern photography of Imre Kinszki (Judit’s father). We then explored the images in Kinszki’s work and examined what made them modern and how they were characteristic of modern photography and art in Europe in the early 20th century.

We began this lesson by watching Centropa’s film, Survival in Sarajevo, and walking through the traveling exhibition of the same name, which we brought to our school.

We began by watching Centropa’s film So Memory Doesn’t Die, about Teofila Silberring’s harrowing experience during the Holocaust. She was saved from starvation by a kind family friend who gave her blueberry pirogues at key moments, and we focused on the role these pirogues played in her story. After discussing this, students were asked to research an important food in their family, and then to make a cookbook page –either by hand, or digitally – and represent the dish and its importance in the family through images, colors, and design.

This project was carried out in two schools: VI Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Juliusza Słowackiego in Kielce  (Poland) and Southeast Guilford High School (USA). In the beginning, students made intro videos presenting themselves. After that, they began making movies. Polish students focused mostly on the history of their families and the Americans thought of an American who influenced them in a positive way. They posted their films on Facebook and commented on other students' movies. They also discussed issues related to current affairs and question revolved around Ukraine and Russia.