Hundreds of schools across Wisconsin will soon hold replica pieces of Holocaust history that will allow students to peer into the lives of those who endured the atrocity.
That’s thanks to the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center (HERC), where staff are creating trunks filled with replicated documents and artifacts from Holocaust victims that have been collected from family members, museums and private collectors.
“It’s really important for these victims and survivors to not be just numbers,” HERC Executive Director Samantha Abramson said. “These materials can be analyzed by the students and touched and really used as a way to make the history feel personal.”
The goal is to create trunks and lesson plans for each of the 429 school districts in the state and train teachers how to use them within the next three to five years. Each trunk will stay at the school and with the teacher.
“The students can interact with it all year if they want, and it can go into different classrooms,” Abramson said.
A few trunks are in development now and will be BETA tested, she said.
One of the educators who is involved in the project is Lindsay McBride, a middle school history teacher in the Northern Ozaukee School District.
“This allows students … to be a historian. That is my biggest goal as a teacher is to show them how to be a historian and to find empathy…that is the most powerful side of it,” she said.
The subjects of the trunks will be a wide range of Holocaust victims and survivors. For example, one of the trunks will feature letters, photographs and documents from Renata Laxova, who was 8 years old when she was taken to England from her home in Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport.
A collector in Waukegan, Illinois, has an original collection of artifacts from Laxova’s life. Recently, Samantha Goldberg, Director of Education at HERC, and McBride went to the Chicago suburb to select items and gave them to a reproducer, who made replicas out of them.
Goldberg said the trunks will be “a blend of pictures, personal letters and documents showing their journey and their story.”
McBride said it was “incredible to feel and see” Laxova’s artifacts from her life.
“It is really empowering. That is what we want to replicate for students,” she said.
One of the replicated documents is an unopened letter from Laxova’s parents. Before she died, she told her family that her wish was for it to never to be opened.
“When you hold it up to the light … you can see some faint handwriting,” McBride said. “It adds another layer of the human element and another layer of personal choice.”
Some of the color pencil and crayon drawings Laxova made will also be included in the trunk.
“We are so used to seeing the Holocaust in black and white, so when we see a child’s drawing in this collection, it shocks the mind,” Abramson said. “We want to make that reality feel tangible for the kids.”
* * *
Loading ...