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Should, Should Not
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While the Music Lasts: Poem to My Younger Self
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Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on The Holocaust
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Tag Archives: The Holocaust
by Alexandria | 3 April 2019 · 10:27 am
Using Photographs to Teach about The Holocaust
Jewish women and children from Subcarpathian Rus, Ukraine, who have been selected for death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, going to gas chambers. Photographer unknown.
When I was in school, we never learned about the Holocaust. Not in grammar school, not in high school, not in college, not in grad school. Despite all the schools' and teachers' claims that we students were being prepared for "the real world," they neglected to tell us some of the most important parts of world history. Granted, I spent most of my life attending Catholic schools where the nuns and priests never mentioned Jews except to say that "Jesus used to be one." Those nuns and priests certainly never mentioned The Holocaust, the concentration camps, or even the Nazis.
My great-grandparents, Aloysius and Stella (née Lili) Hirsch were trying to protect the family from anti-Semitism by sending us to those Catholic schools. It didn't help. Despite the fact that all of us inherited my grandparents' strawberry-blonde hair and green eyes, I got called "Kike" and "Yid" and lots of other racist names from the time I was in first grade. When I asked my Grandpa why we couldn't talk about being Jewish, it was my Grandma who interrupted us, telling me that I must always say, "I was baptized and I go to Catholic schools." Since I was only 8 at the time, I did what she told me.
My great-grandmother Stella (née Lili) and great-grandfather Aloysius Hirsch on the day of my First Communion, 1962. Photo © Alexandria Szeman.
It wasn't till I was an adult and able to research the family genealogy that I learned the source of my great-grandparents' fear: during the War and the Holocaust, they'd lost all their family members in Germany. All those German members of the Hirsch and Wekesser families have their dates of death listed as "1940-1945?" with no places of burial. I have few photographs of my great-grandparents, and none of their family members who remained in Germany. That saddens me, not only because my great-grandparents feared telling us any stories about them, but because we have nothing to recall them to us.
Photographs are an important aid to history, even if we do not know all the names of the people in the pictures. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has several videos resources to help people learn about the Holocaust, and to teach it, using photographs. I have included them all in this post for your convenience, but these are all Yad Vashem videos.
Teaching The Holocaust
Using Photographs
Child survivors at Auschwitz, 1945. (WikiMedia)
In the first video of the Yad Vashem, Teaching the Holocaust Using Photographs, Franziska Reiniger, staff member for the International School for Holocaust Studies (ISHS) at Yad Vashem, discusses some of the important things to bear in mind before using Holocaust photographs with students.
Why was the photograph taken?
Was the photograph staged?
Where was the photograph found?
Photographs, like all historical documents, have limitations and are open to interpretation. These things need to be taken into account before using photographs to teach others about the Holocaust.
Photographs as Propaganda
A group of Jews escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers, 19 April 1943. The photo was part of SS Gen. Stroop's report to his Commanding Officer: introduced as evidence of War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945.
In Photographs as Propaganda, the second video in the Yad Vashem series, Teaching the Holocaust Using Photographs, ISHS staff member Franziska discusses the Nazi photographs and films that were made to promote their anti-Semitic ideology. In fact, she states, the Nazis used the camera as a weapon against their Jewish victims, starting in Poland in 1939 where the soldiers first encountered Jews who were not fully assimilated into their non-Jewish society.
Documentation of Atrocities
Three U.S. soldiers look at bodies in an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945. Photo by unidentified concentration camp in Germany, at time of liberation by U.S. Army.
Official Lodz Ghetto inmate and photographer Henryk Ross and his photos make up the third part of the Yad Vashem Series Teaching the Holocaust Using Photographs. In Documentation of Atrocities, Ross demonstrates how he surreptitiously photographed the Ghetto Jews and then secretly developed them. Later, Ross served as a witness against Adolf Eichmann in his trial for Crimes Against Humanity.
All three of these films are part of Yad Vashem's Holocaust Education Video Toolbox. Please visit their site for additional video resources.
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Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) 2014
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◊ ◊ New York Times Book Review "Notable Book" and "Top 100 Books of Year" ◊ University of Rochester Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize "the outstanding book ...
◊ Grand Prize Winner, Elliston Poetry Prize Isabel & Mary Neff Creative Writing Fellowship First Place, Elliston Poetry Prize Second Place, Elliston Poetry Prize ◊ ...
Photographic Introduction to the Holocaust
Rare Historical Holocaust Photos
Holocaust Timeline and Overview
Holocaust Days of Remembrance
Learn about The Holocaust on USHMM
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
For more information on the Holocaust database
or to fill out Pages of Testimony, visit
Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims
Filed under Documentary/Historical Video, History, Holocaust, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Holocaust Survivor Testimony, Memoir
Tagged as Adolf Eichmann, Aloysius Hirsch, anti-Semitism, Documentation of Atrocities, first communion, Holocaust Education Video Toolbox, International School for Holocaust Studies, Lodz Ghetto, Lodz Ghetto Henryk Ross, Poland 1939, Polish Jewish communities 1939, Stella (née Lili) Wekesser Hirsch, The Holocaust, World Holocaust Remembrance Center, World War II, Yad Vashem
by Alexandria | 26 April 2014 · 5:14 am
International Holocaust Memorial Day
Yad Vashem Yom HaShoah, 2012
Once again, the world prepares for Yom HaShoah (The Catastrophe, or The Utter Destruction) in memory of all the Jews who were killed during the Holocaust, of all the survivors, as well as those who fought against the Nazis: the partisans, the Members of the Underground, those in the Ghettos who fought, and the Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews. At 11:00 a.m. in Israel, sirens will sound for two minutes, and around the world, Jews and others will stand in silence for reflection, meditation, and devotion.
We must never let The Holocaust happen again. Not to the Jews. Not to any group of people based on their ethnicity, their religious beliefs, or the color of their skin. We must actively fight against intolerance and bigotry. We must prevent genocide. How can we do that if we do not actively remember what the Nazis did to the bulk of the European Jews between 1932 and 1945?
Jewish women and children from the Ukraine, just before they entered the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photographer unknown.
Some people do not know that the persecution started long before the War. The Nazis were not peaceful and friendly with the Jews one day, then gassing them and putting them in crematorium ovens the next. It was a gradual process: identification, segregation, loss of property, loss of employment, deportation, isolation, death from starvation and work, then systematic extermination. At each step, others had to stand by, silently, passively, and permit such persecution. At each stage, whole groups of people and entire countries gave the Nazis permission by not actively opposing them.
It has now been 71 years since the end of the War and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps, 84 years since Hitler was elected to power and began to slowly implement his anti-Semitic policies against the Jews. Soon, there will be no survivors left to remind the living that The Holocaust was real; it did happen; it is not a fairy tale created by anyone.
Yad Vashem, The History of the Holocaust Museum in Israel, has gathered many stories of survivors, taping them so that we may remember. So that The Holocaust may never happen again. In preparation for Yom HaShoah, I watched some of the survivors' stories. I want to share some with you.
Holocaust History Museum
Yad Vashem's world famous Holocaust History Museum is a prism-like triangular structure that penetrates the mountain from one side to the other, with both ends dramatically cantilevering into the open air. An experiential dimension was integrated into the museum's design, giving visitors an overall impression of the time, place and atmosphere. Inside the museum, a series of diagonal channels cut in the floor of the walkway (prism) guides the visitor into each of the eight-meter high underground galleries depicting different chapters of the Shoah. The gently sloping floor and narrowing prism enhances the changing narrative, creating the illusion of descending deep into the mountain. Different aspects of the Holocaust are reflected through the use of original artifacts, documentation, testimonies, film, literature, diaries, letters, and works of art (from Yad Vashem). Virtual Tour
Elie Wiesel — recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Human Rights Activist, and renowned author — was 15 when the Nazis deported him, along with his family, from their home in Transylvania to Auschwitz. Losing both his parents and younger sister in the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel has made it his lifelong goal to teach the world about the Holocaust. In the video he commemorates his father by filling out a Page of Testimony for Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. By filling out a Page for his father, who perished in Buchenwald concentration camp shortly before liberation, Elie Wiesel added his father to the millions of Holocaust victims commemorated by family and friends. Through the Pages of Testimony the victims names and identities are restored, that which the Nazis and their collaborators had tried to erase forever (from Yad Vashem Holocaust Histories). Elie Wiesel commemorates his father.
Please join me and millions of others this Yom HaShoah, as well as the days before and after, remembering the victims, the activists, and the survivors of the Holocaust.
For a Photographic Introduction to the Holocaust, visit my Pinterest Board
For more information on the database or
to fill out Pages of Testimony, visit
Dr. Alexandria Szeman
Author. New York Times Book Review Notable Book and Top 100 Books of the Year, Kafka Prize: The Kommandant's Mistress. Finalist, Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards (2017): M is for Munchers: The Serial Killers Next Door. Elliston Poetry Prize, Neff Creative Writing Fellowship, Writer's Digest Honorable Mention (non-rhyming) Poetry Competition: Love in the Time of Dinosaurs and Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on The Holocaust. UKA Press Grand Prize: Naked, with Glasses. Writer @ TheMighty and @ MigraineMantras. Childhood sex abuse survivor. Advocate.
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