Shoah Foundation sponsors Holocaust education

Recently, the Shoah Foundation selected 25 teachers to take part in a four-day professional development program in Poland. Staff members from the foundation instructed teachers on how to use the institute’s Visual History Archive, a collection of more than 53,000 audiovisual recounts of experiences during the Holocaust and other genocides.

The foundation partnered with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Discovery Education and the World Jewish Congress on the program, called Auschwitz: The Past is Present.

The program supported observance of Auschwitz’s liberation anniversary. The “Past is Present” focuses on discovering a generation of teachers and students who will learn to engage in the study and remembrance of the Holocaust.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the passage of 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, a network of concentration camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during World War II. The camp was the site of the murders of more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, between 1942 and late 1944.

On Tuesday, more than 100 survivors and their liberators attended the commemoration.Director Steven Spielberg, who founded the Shoah Foundation in 1994, was also in attendance.

Participating teachers were selected to work on the program through a worldwide contest held by Discovery Education and the Shoah Foundation.

Fifteen teachers were from the U.S. and 10 were from countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Rwanda. Twelve junior interns were also selected to participate in the program in Poland.

In a statement released by USC News, one history and language arts teacher at Turning Point Academy in Emporia, Kansas, addressed how the professional development program in Poland would help in teaching her students about the Holocaust.

“Students must understand how hate and intolerance led to near annihilation of an entire ethnic group,” Barbara Fowler, a history and language arts teacher from Kansas who was among the 25 teachers selected to go on the trip, said. “This visit will allow me to guide my students as they seek to understand the perspective of all those involved including victims, perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders and rescuers.”

Those participating in the trip to Poland visited the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, participated in workshops with first-hand testimonies and attended a reception with Holocaust survivors as well as the 70th anniversary commemoration. According to the Shoah Foundation, the trip aimed to enhance both educators’ and students’ understanding of the Holocaust and the significance of preserving Auschwitz.

The survivors hope their story will not be forgotten and will be passed on for many generations to come.

“Those who lived through the Holocaust have carried the burden of remembering long enough,” said USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith in a statement to USC News. “It’s up to us now, their children and grandchildren, to lift its heavy weight off their shoulders. We are ready to take on the responsibility of ensuring that this tragic chapter of human history is never repeated.”