Today, Tour for Humanity returned to a secondary school in Whitby, where Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC) Educator Daniella worked with Grade 10 History students through the Canadian Experience workshop. Given how late in the semester it is, today the Tour for Humanity material acted as review and exam preparation for the students. The groups were quite familiar with the Holocaust, Residential Schools and the story of the M.S. St. Louis and as such Daniella was able to discuss the topics in greater detail. One of the classes also spent some time discussing the fact that the images and videos in the Tour for Humanity Holocaust video were real. Daniella always makes a point to tell classes that they are seeing real footage, and then asks the students to explain what real footage means. At the end of the video one student again wanted confirmation that nothing was fake, which Daniella explained it wasn’t. Daniella also took the opportunity to address the numbers shown in the videos and how those are numbers of Holocaust survivors so they spent some time discussing how the Nazis tried to strip people of their identities.

It was a good day and Tour for Humanity is already booked to return to this same secondary school again in the fall and spring to work with their new groups of Grade 10 students.

The FSWC classroom was also busy today. A middle school group travelled to FSWC from Guelph so the Grades 7-8 students could participate in our Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust workshop and to hear survivor testimony from Andy Reti. FSWC visited this same school a couple weeks ago to deliver workshops on the Roots of Hate and Intolerance in Canada and when they heard about the option of coming to our FSWC classroom, they jumped at the opportunity to have the same students hear directly from a survivor before the end of the year. 

The students impressed Elena with their knowledge of the Holocaust, as she knew they would from the previous workshops. All of the kids had read books and done projects on the Holocaust so they had a good base of knowledge. This led to many thoughtful questions. One of the most interesting questions came from a student who had done research on the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals and wanted to know what happened to all of the forward-thinking scientists studying human sexuality in Germany before the war. Elena told them that Germany was one of the leading countries in psychiatric medicine and one of those leaders, Magnus Hirschfeld, started the German Institute for Sexual Research where many new theories were developed and human experience studied for the first time. The institute was destroyed by the Nazis and its work seen as "Jewish degeneracy" because of Hirschfeld's background. The Nazi regime was reacting against a lot of the changes that happened in early 20th century Germany.