NEWS FEATURE: Giving students across-the-board Holocaust education

c. 1999 Religion News Service HARTFORD, Conn. _ A sound academic program is important at Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford, Conn., says Margaret Williamson, vice president for academics. But just as important is educating”about ethics, morals and values.” That is why Williamson did more than sit passively through a presentation about the Holocaust […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ A sound academic program is important at Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford, Conn., says Margaret Williamson, vice president for academics. But just as important is educating”about ethics, morals and values.” That is why Williamson did more than sit passively through a presentation about the Holocaust at a teachers’ convention in 1998.”I felt challenged professionally and personally to do something with this information,”the veteran educator said.

When she returned to her school, she discussed with the faculty what could be done to convey to the students the immensity of the genocide that wiped out 6 million Jews in historically Christian Europe. The faculty agreed more was needed than a lesson in social studies. What they came up with was a unique interdisciplinary approach involving all of the school’s 580 students, from freshman to seniors, in every one of their classes _ from fine arts to gym.


The Holocaust education project, introduced in January, took up the third quarter of the school year and is thought to be more extensive than anything done in Catholic schools anywhere.”No one has any real sense of what other schools around the country have been doing, but anecdotally I can say this would not be typical. It could be a model for other schools,”Dan Napolitano said.

Napolitano, a teacher at Georgetown Preparatory School in Rockville, Md., and a teaching fellow of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has been involved in preparing curriculum materials on the Holocaust for Catholic secondary schools.

Michael Berenbaum, director of the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, founded by movie director Steven Spielberg, was similarly impressed.”What the school is doing is to be enormously respected,”he said.”Generally the Catholic Church has been singularly and seriously responsive to the Holocaust itself. It has done a very good job in making institutional changes. The pope has provided very serious leadership, and they have changed both doctrine and practice in the aftermath of the Holocaust.” Berenbaum and Napolitano were among those who made a presentation on the Holocaust at the National Catholic Education Association’s conference Williamson attended.

Williamson said the project had the enthusiastic support of the whole school community. Providence itself seemed to be playing a role, she said. For instance, students in an honors program had already selected Germany for an annual study-abroad tour during spring break, so they included a visit to the concentration camp at Dachau.

Also coincidentally,”The Sound of Music”had been chosen as the senior class play. The musical portrays the travails of the Austrian Catholic Von Trapp family when Nazis take over the family castle. Even the wider world cooperated when”Life Is Beautiful,”a movie set in a concentration camp, won some Academy Awards.”We were getting this sense of eerie things happening,”Williamson said. Less welcome in the lesson plan from the world at large was the genocidal assault by the Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and the school massacre in Littleton, Colo.”They (students) had a lot of emotions,”Williamson said, and they learned that”this is what happens when hatreds grow.” The object of the Holocaust education project, the vice principal said, was”to teach kids that you can make a difference”in the face of evil. They responded to the project with gusto.

Each student in the school made a black butterfly out of paper and inscribed it with the name of a child who died in the Holocaust. They prayed the traditional Jewish prayer of Kaddish for the victims and hung the butterflies on the wall at the entrance to the school.

In math classes, students drew floor plans of their bedrooms and compared them to the dimensions of Anne Frank’s living quarters; science classes discussed the ethical responsibility of scientists involved in gas chamber executions; foreign-language students wrote poems about the Holocaust and its victims in French and Spanish. In language arts, students researched the origins and celebration of Hanukkah and discussed prejudice against Jews and African Americans; fine-arts students created beaded butterflies for an altar display in the school chapel and performed dramatic readings of poems and interpretive dances; and in gym, the students became numbers and participated in a simulated concentration camp roll call.


At school assemblies, Holocaust survivors gave eyewitness accounts. Their stories prepared the 13 students in the Honors Institute for Leadership and Life, who visited Dachau in April.”I had expected to feel nauseated mentally but was surprised to find I had no anger, no incredible grief,”said Niamh O’Leary, a senior.”The patches of grass were so green, the stone paths were so white and straight and the sky was so blue,”she said.”Then I realized there were nice days in 1943, too, but people died anyway.” (OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

The site, empty and haunting, did not so much upset her as to make her feel reverence.”It was solemn, like it is solemn at Arlington (National Cemetery),”O’Leary said.

Pamela Murphy, also a senior, chose not to enter the camp because she was afraid she would become too emotional. She sat at a bus stop outside the camp’s chain-link fence and made what she called”an imagination journey.”She said she imagined herself inside the camp, a stark place of terror, looking out at people beyond the fence going about their normal daily activities.

In that reflective mood, she was upset when a group of tourists exited the camp as if it had been nothing more than a visit to another museum.”The thing that really struck me was one girl was eating potato chips and chattering away. In my mind, I went, how could you do that?”Murphy said.”If I spoke German, I would have said something to her.”

Murphy quickly pointed out that she was not making aspersions against all Germans _ just that insensitive teenager and some of her companions.

DEA END RENNER

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