Resources

Students learn to discuss the topic of Holocaust by comparing pictures of women Holocaust survivors, and talking about their stories. The idea of this exercise is to make Holocaust stories personal and visual (while at the same time not too graphic or violent), in order to let students relate better and gain a concrete idea about what people went through. In this exercise, students will discover particular faces and life stories. 

Students learn about Holocaust history through individual women’s stories, and apply their knowledge through creating their own poster. By making informative posters, students learn how to sort out important information and remember it through active learning. Students “educate themselves” by becoming creators of their own learning material. 

This exercise is divided into seven practical parts. Its aim is to help students imagine stories from the Holocaust, and contrast them with realities learned from women’s biographies. The idea is to let students work with their imagination, story-telling, map-reading, picture interpretation and text analysis. Elements such as music, live art and personal map creation should help students be personally engaged with some Holocaust stories, while keeping the learning atmosphere playful. 

This exercise

• Extends students' spatial and temporal awareness of the Holocaust;
• Adds depth and nuance to understanding of the evolution and development of the Holocaust;
• Raises awareness about women who survived the Holocaust and the ways in which they communicated their experiences;
• Helps students improve their research skills;
• Challenges the understanding of the Nazi concentration camps (often limited and Auschwitz-centric), through a comparative analysis of two camp experiences . 
• Highlights the diversity of experiences and responses

After hearing about Lisa Pinhas' life and seeing photos of her, students will create a poster about her that reflects her experiences. The tool for this task is Google Jamboard.  This exercise aims at developing historical knowledge of camp life in Auschwitz-Birkenau, at adding depth and nuance to understanding the woman’s perspective and at practicing analytical competencies, as well as familiarising them with multimodal texts. This exercise helps students to reflect on the ethical responsibility for narrating the past.

The exercise promotes collaboration among the students and historical contextualising of one’s individual perspective. It also helps students better understand the history of the Holocaust. 

This exercise is meant to encourage students to look beyond the image. Students should develop values such as empathy by relating to the people in the photo.

The activity includes a discussion about the significance of photos in which students are asked to explain why photos are important in general and why specifically photos shared by Holocaust survivors are a unique historical source.