#200 Introduction to The Shoah (Holocaust)

*This lesson is appropriate for students in grade six and older

The Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, “the catastrophe”), was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler‘s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe. Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to about 11 million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.

In this lesson, you will be introduced to the history of the Shoah, meet Anne Frank, hear a testimony from a Shoah survivor, and learn about the Righteous Among the Nations.

#1 ANNE FRANK: A PERSONAL STORY

Anne Frank, (June 1929 – February or March 1945) was a German-born diarist and writer. She is one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Her diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, which documents her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, is one of the world’s most widely known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

#2 HISTORY: SEVENTY YEARS LATER

On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland was liberated by Soviet soldiers. It was the largest camp established by Germany during World War 2 – and its name is forever associated with the Nazi plan to wipe out Europe’s Jewish population. More than a million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were killed there. 70 years later, a few survivors returned. This is their story.

#3 STEVEN SPIELBERG AND THE SURVIVORS OF THE SHOAH FOUNDATION

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action.^[2] It was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing his Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List. The original aim of the Foundation was to record testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Shoah.

#4: MEET THE RIGHTEOUS: CORNELIS (KEES) AND HEINTJE ROGGEVEEN

Max Noach, born in 1920 in Utrecht, worked as a land surveyor for the Dutch government as a teenager. By the end of 1940, Max was fired because he was Jewish and Jews were no longer allowed to work in Government service. His supervisor at the time, Cornelis (Kees) Roggeveen, assured him that he could turn to him for help if and when the situation for Jews would become unbearable. In the summer of 1942, with the start of the orders for Jews to report for ‘work in the East’, Max turned to Roggeveen for help. Kees and Heintje Roggeveen immediately opened their home in the village of Nederweert (prov. Limburg) for him and saved his life. In 2010 the Roggeveen’s were honored by Yad Vashem in Israel.

#5: YAD VASHEM: THE GARDEN FOR THE RIGHTEOUS OF THE WORLD, ISRAEL

The Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations is part of the much larger Yad Vashem complex located on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. Along with some two dozen different structures which comprise the Yad Vashem memorial – the second most-visited destination in the country after the Western Wall – the Garden of the Righteous is meant to honor those non-Jews who during the Holocaust risked their lives to save Jews. The entire site receives one million visitors annually. In the Garden, names of the Righteous among the Nations are engraved in alphabetical order on walls arranged according to country