Classroom Holocaust Museum

Letter of Welcome

Welcome to the Holocaust Museum Project.  Thank you for considering to work with us on this international project.  Below I outline the Classroom Holocaust Museum and some of the goals that this project seeks to achieve.

Holocaust Museum Project

Quite simply, this project involves teachers internationally creating Holocaust museums in their classrooms.  Having done this in my school in Canada, I can assure you that it is quite doable and will be one of the most enriching experiences for you and your students.
(see: http://www.hcjh.ednet.ns.ca/HOLOCAUST/HOLOCAUST%20PAGE.htm)

Here are some the steps to take to make this project successful:

1. Tell the students they are going to make a museum in the classroom.
2. Inform the media early about what you are doing.
3. Teach about the Holocaust (or a genocide you are studying in your curriculum).  I used information I got from Yad Vashem, books, and reliable internet sites like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
4. Teach about who the Jews were before the Nazi era. I used a picture study and had students compare the living conditions and lives of the people in the photos (poor, rich, educated, uneducated, healthy, sick, etc).
5. Find a few case studies of people (children their own age) so that students can relate better to their story.
6. Teach about anti-Semitism in Europe (and elsewhere) prior to Hitler.
7. Teach about the rise of Nazism.
8. Teach about the Holocaust
9. Put the museum together.  Students have dozens of good ideas to help with this.
10. Students become the tour guides for the museum teaching the general public that have been invited and the other classes in the school.

There is much you can include in your museum.  The difficulty will be in leaving out much information that is available.  The students and you can start making and gathering artifacts for the museum beginning with the first class.  I am asking participants to consider using paper clip chains to hang from the ceiling as the central display of the museum.  I hung 100 000 paper clips in over 1000 chains from the ceiling in my classroom.  The effect is incredibly powerful.  Each paper clip represents a person lost in the Holocaust.  When the museum finally closes, I encourage teachers and students to take the paper clip chains, link them end to end, and take them to the main street of your community to see how far they stretch.  This gives your students and the citizens an opportunity to visualize just how large a number 6 million is.

Goals:

…to educate our youth to better prepare them

• for understanding genocide,
• for working together with their teachers with a common purpose in mind and to share this with their community,
• to be alert to the leadership in their community,
• to change conditions that lead to genocide.

To open dialogue in the community about atrocities around the world.

There is so much more to say, but I will leave that for when you contact me with your questions at waymac@hrsb.ns.ca.

Sincerely,
Wayne MacIntyre

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