The Woodward News

Local News

May 14, 2008

Students dig deeper into Holocaust

You may know that almost six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, but do you know which country saved its Jews from being hauled off to concentration camps during the Holocaust?

If you visited the eighth grade Holocaust museum at the Woodward Middle School Tuesday evening, you might have learned that the country was Denmark, as one of the student displays explained that most Danish Jews were sent to neutral Sweden to protect them from the Nazis.

Helping the students learn these lesser known truths about the Holocaust and dig deeper into that pivotal time in history is what the museum is all about, said Amy Whitewater, eighth grade English teacher.

“We wanted them to learn about things they didn’t already know about,” Whitewater said.

The museum is actually the culmination of a cross-curriculum study unit that the eighth grade students complete every year, according to Sonya Covalt, eighth grade English teacher.

During the unit, the students not only study World War II in their history classes but they also study the play based on the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ in their English classes, she said. In addition, they get a first hand account of the Holocaust from survivor Michael Jacobs.

Then each of the students develops a project in which they display what they have learned through the unit and through additional research they have done into the subject matter, Covalt and Whitewater said.

This year’s museum not only featured a display on the role that Denmark played during the Holocaust, but it also had displays featuring everything from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the liberation of Jews from concentration camps.

A few students shared accounts of World War II and the Holocaust from their relatives who experienced it first hand, Whitewater said, noting that one girl had accounts of both sides as she had relatives that were forced to fight for the Germans and other relatives who helped the Allies.

Some interesting and different projects this year included one girl’s fictional representation of what it would have been like to live in the Ghetto and an original movie on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was written, acted and directed by a group of eighth grade boys, she said.

“Many threw their heart and soul into their project,” Whitewater said.

“I think they’ve done an incredible job,” she said. “They’ve certainly put their research skills to work and they’ve learned a lot.”

And while most of the students did their displays on a topic that related directly to the Holocaust, Covalt said there were a few that tied what happened in the Holocaust to more recent acts of genocide, even those that continue today, such as in Rwanda or Darfur.

Because part of the goal in learning about the Holocaust is learning from the past so we don’t repeat it, she said.

“As our (Holocaust) survivor says every year: we must always remember; we must never forget,” Covalt said.

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