Questions about the Holocaust

Please excuse me if for once I blow my own trumpet. When we planned our new Holocaust room I ended up, by default, being responsible for the content of the display. I borrowed and stole material from the Internet for quotes, from Ann Beaglehole and from Jessica Caldwell for the Timeline, I incorporated the panels about Hanka Pressburg and Clare Galambos ifrom the previous display, and worked with Lisa Silestian on the Deckston panels. All credit should go to  Az James and her team at Workshop e for bringing all this material together into a coherent exhibition, But the material proved to be an excellent teaching tool. It tells the story of the Holocaust in a logical and comprehensible manner that students have no trouble following. To make sense of all this a guide was needed which addressed, and asked relevant questions about each panel. I could ad lib about these panels, but the guide was needed for other educators, less steeped in Holocaust lore, and for visitors. I have been working on this guide for some time, recording teaching points that I used in my lessons. Now I finally completed this Guide, in time for the Open Day next Sunday. Louisa turned it into attractively designed sheets, and now I hope that people will find it useful. I ask questions about the Buttons, and quote Himmler, who said that the children had to be killed to make sure that there will be no one left to avenge the murder of their parents. I ask about other victims of Nazi persecution, and the unique place of Jews; about the Map of European Jewish life, the different fate of Jews from various parts of Europe, and it was my suggestions that the map should focus not only on the number of Jews killed, but more importantly, on the number of Jews who had lived in each country before the Holocaust and the destruction of an entire Yiddish speaking culture. I raised questions about the book burning in 1933, which some misunderstood as a bonfire of Jewish books. It was not that. Goebbels justified it by saying that 'the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end'. This opens up a discussion about what he meant by Jewish intellectualism. I wrote a unit on propaganda and the way the children's book Trust no fox was used to teach hatred of Jews. I also wrote a unit on anti-Semitism and its various roots: religious political, warped scientific, nationalist and sheer envy. I put Hanka's and Clare's story in the context of Theresienstadt as a camp established to mislead, and the Hungarian Holocaust, and how the murder of Jews was given greater priority than fighting the war. Finally I showed through the story of the Deckston children New Zealand's role as a haven for those who managed to get here. Creating the contents of the Holocaust Centre, with the Guide to it, is probably the most important piece of writing I have done.