Today Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center’s (FSWC) Education Department continued it’s summer workshops with a Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust workshop at a local private school. The school runs a summer enrichment program, which means that these are students who are volunteering to take extra classes through the summer months so that they can take more electives during the school year.

Today’s group consisted of 27 Grade 10 students studying history. They had recently finished a unit on World War II so there was already some basic knowledge on the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.  FSWC Educator Daniella began with an overview of Simon Wiesenthal’s history - the class was particularly interested in his career as a Nazi Hunter. Daniella spoke about some of the high profile Nazis that Wiesenthal was credited with arresting as well as his push for education and information to learn from the horrors of the Holocaust.  

The students had many questions throughout the workshop which also helped guide the material.  As Daniella began with a historical overview of antisemitism, students were shocked by the except from The Poisonous Mushroom, an antisemitic children’s book published in Germany in 1938. Daniella asked the class to analyse the image and how it would help shape the broader narrative of “Jewish people are the enemy.” Daniella also discussed the negative ramifications of children growing up exposed to such racist ideologies. This became evident again while looking at the Nazi boycott law and images of young people in the Hitler Youth hanging banners in front of Jewish stores. Daniella explained to the group that these were in many cases the same types of children who grew up reading The Poisonous Mushroom.

Before the workshop started Daniella put tape on the ground to simulate a scale model of one of the cattle cars, an activity which really impacted the students. When Daniella asked them to fit themselves into the space, there were only 27 of them so they were able to fit relatively easily. When Daniella told the group that there would be an additional 20-30 people in that space, they looked horrified. At the end of the workshop, one student brought up the pogroms in Russia prior to the war, so Daniella spent some time discussing the treatment of Jewish people in Eastern Europe as well.