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.

This is a history project but because we want our students ultimately to teach each other, we started with an introductory video conference during which students asked each other questions and learned a little about one another. Students will then choose a biography from the Centropa website to read and study, as an example of what life was like for someone in a Central or Eastern European country during WWII.

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 20^th century.

Herbert Lewin - stories of my life compared with "Address Unknown"

The story of Herbert Lewin reflects the life of a secular Jewish family with its gentile neighbors  in Vienna.

The story "Address Unknown" is about business associates and friends who are both of German origin. One is a Jew living in the U.S.A, and his gentile friend who returns to Germany.

This lesson aims to enlighten students about Sephardic history in the Balkans, and was originally taught in the context of a Jewish day school in the United States.  The Jews expelled from Spain who settled in the Balkans were welcomed, and Jews were generally accepted as part of society, as they were in all parts of the Ottoman Empire.