RESOURCES for TEACHING about the Holocaust, Rescuers, and Antisemitism
The best books about rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust https://shepherd.com/best-books/rescuers-of-jews-during-the-holocaust
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/en
Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem https://www.yadvashem.org/
Facing History and Ourselves https://www.facinghistory.org/
Highly Recommended Documentaries
The Number on Great Grandfather’s Arm (2018) https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the-number-on-great-grandpas-arm This is a short video produced by HBO and is free. It’s an excellent overview of the Holocaust suitable for children and adults. A great grandson interviews his grandfather about the Holocaust. It is beautifully done and very informative. I would recommend this for every grade level starting in 5th grade. Adult children of Holocaust survivors also were very moved by this documentary. This documentary packs a lot into 20 minutes.
Karski and the Lords of Humanity by Slawomir Grunberg. (2015) This is the story of Jan Karski, a Polish underground courier who traveled across occupied Europe infiltrating the Warsaw Ghetto an Nazi transit camps to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the Allied powers. This documentary combines archival footage with animated sequences including interviews with Karski. Available on Amazon Prime.
Who Will Write Our History, directed by Roberta Grossman (2019) is available though Amazon Prime and is also a very compelling, well crafted with original footage mixed with dramatization. This is their description: “In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders decided to fith back. Known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not by guns or fists but with the ultimate weapon: the truth.”
Paper Clips Description on Amazon: ” an inspiring 2004 documentary about a consciousness-raising project that blossomed into something beautiful at a rural Tennessee school. When the principal of Whitwell Middle School sought a program that would teach diversity to a predominantly white, Protestant student body, the notion of focusing on the Holocaust–specifically Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews–seemed like an obvious way to go. But understanding what “six million” looks like became a challenge. Thus was born the idea of collecting that number of paper clips at Whitwell as a visual reference.”
