Seventy-seven years ago this week, anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany exploded in a violent rampage. Attackers demolished Jewish people’s homes and businesses, torched synagogues, and sent some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps.
What happened on Nov. 9-10, 1938, is known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. It was an ominous chapter of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews.
It isn’t ancient history. Seventy-seven years is shorter than today’s average American life span.
“Our goal is that students don’t see this as something that only happened in the past,” said Branda Anderson, who teaches world history and contemporary world issues at Kamiak High School in Mukilteo.
Anderson and Chris Ellinger, a Mountlake Terrace High School teacher, share lessons of the Holocaust with their students and through their work with the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle.
The new museum opened to the public Oct. 18 in the Belltown area. With a different name, it was established more than 25 years ago as an educational resource center. Holocaust survivors, part of the center’s speakers bureau, have for years shared their harrowing experiences.
“We’re continuing to do all the things we did, but now there’s a new element. People can come and learn,” said Ilana Cone Kennedy, the center’s director of education.
Kennedy said the center’s permanent exhibit focuses on the stories and artifacts of local Holocaust survivors. “We are here to tell those stories, to remember this history and move it forward,” she said. A traveling Anne Frank exhibit will be on display from March to May, she said.
The museum also has traveling artifacts that were once at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Anderson and Ellinger are working on new school curriculum based on the Seattle museum’s exhibit. It will meet Common Core standards for middle school and high school, Kennedy said.
On the Holocaust center’s website, the Kamiak teacher shares one of her lesson plans in a section called “From Teachers for Teachers.”
Her lesson, “Oneg Shabbat,” covers Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, including secret archives written by people there. Anderson said the archive was established by Emanuel Ringelbum. “He really wanted to preserve history from the Jewish perspective,” she said. “The Jews of Poland could see the writing on the wall. The ultimate goal was to send these archives to the United States, but the ghettos were destroyed before that could happen.”
Two of the archives survived and are in museums, while a third was never found. Anderson’s lesson for students is that writing can be a form of resistance.
Anderson, 39, said her passion for study of the Holocaust began when she saw “Schindler’s List” as a high school student. “My best friend in high school, her ancestors were German Jews. They lost family in the Holocaust,” she said.
At Kamiak, her Holocaust units focus on voices of victims, rather than on the horrific methods of murder. “There’s a book called ‘Salvaged Pages,’ a collection of diaries of kids during the Holocaust,” she said. “A young boy in Germany talks about Kristallnacht. This is a great resource for students to hear the voice of people their age.”
Anderson and Ellinger, neither of whom are Jewish, make what happened in the past relevant through discussions of genocide in recent times — in Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia and Rwanda.
“To teenagers, most everything is ancient history,” said Ellinger, 43, who teaches humanities, history and English at Mountlake Terrace High. Tenth-graders there read “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s account of his time as a boy and his father’s death in the Nazi camps.
Along with genocide, Ellinger said he covers harassment and bullying, “things that are real to them.”
Ellinger studied the Holocaust as an Alfred Lerner Fellow at Columbia University in New York. Both teachers have traveled to Europe in their quest to teach why Holocaust history matters.
“I approach it with the question, ‘Why did this happen?’ This is preventable human behavior,” Ellinger said. “There were opportunities for this not to happen.”
He cited the SS St. Louis, a vessel that in 1939 carried Jewish refugees from Europe to Cuba, only to be turned back when neither Cuba nor the United States would let it land. Today’s Syrian refugee crisis raises new questions. “What is our role in this? As a government, do we just sit idly by?” Ellinger said.
Since its opening, Kennedy said the museum has been filled with visitors. “The history doesn’t change, but the lesson we can learn from it is always evolving,” she said.
“We say that change begins with me,” Kennedy said. “Small actions make a difference.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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