Northern Burlington County Regional Middle School teacher brings the dark realities of the Holocaust home to her eighth-grade students.
By: William Wichert
Nancy Collier, an eighth-grade reading teacher at Northern Burlington County Regional Middle School, doesn’t believe in sugarcoating the Holocaust.
During one class a few years ago, when her students were discussing how they would have been treated at the hands of the Nazi regime, one boy with cerebral palsy raised his hand and asked Ms. Collier what would have happened to him.
Not meaning to soften the reality of a crime that took millions of lives in the name of hatred and intolerance, Ms. Collier said to him: "They would have sent you to the gas chamber."
The boy’s classmates were stunned at the pronouncement. They would have killed him? But he knew it was the truth. "Yeah, I thought so," Ms. Collier recalled him as saying.
Sitting in her classroom last Thursday, a week before today’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ms. Collier remembered that moment and how she didn’t want to lie to her students.
Teaching about the Holocaust and the World War II era is required by the state, but Ms. Collier employs everything from photos and live performances to museum trips and even old shoes to get the point across to her students.
"I think the Holocaust is a (teaching) unit that has so much volatility in it in terms of values for the kids," she said. "The point of our Holocaust unit is what happens to people in an attitude of intolerance."
At the beginning of this year, Ms. Collier, who created the school’s Holocaust curriculum several years ago, teamed up with eighth-grade teachers from the writing and history classes to educate about 100 students about the tragic event.
For many students, an introduction to the topic was the first step. "There are still large numbers of children who have not heard the term, Holocaust," said Ms. Collier. "That frightens me. That (such) ignorance still exists in society."
One of her methods of teaching her students without sugarcoating the tragedy is to take the children on a "tour" of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The students do not make the trip down there, but each one is given a visitor’s guide and a passport of a person who experienced the Holocaust.
With the guide in hand, the students read about each of the floors of the museum, detailing the history and growing calamity of the Holocaust, and when they get to the end, they learn whether or not the person on their passport survived.
"It moves kids," said Ms. Collier. "It’s very meaningful that the kids can put this experience to a face."
The face that this year’s students may always attach to the Holocaust is that of Esther Terner Raab. In February, the students attended a performance of "Dear Esther," a play about Ms. Raab’s confinement and escape from the concentration camp in Sobibor, Poland.
A native of the town of Chelm, Ms. Raab saw her parents murdered before being sent to Sobibor. On Oct. 14, 1943, she and her cousin planned the escape of 300 prisoners, 46 of whom would survive the war.
"It was powerful. It’s probably one of the most powerful out-of-school field trip experiences I’ve ever had," said Ms. Collier. "Not only a Holocaust survivor, but this woman who had the mental spirit, psychological strength, to escape one of the worst death camps."
When the play was over, the students met Ms. Raab and gave her poems they had written about the Holocaust. Some of the kids asked "How’s Izzy?," referring to her husband of over 50 years, and others wanted to hear more details about the escape.
Looking at her face, Ms. Collier said she saw something there, a telling detail about the lasting effects of the Holocaust.
"There seems to be this veil of sadness that hangs over her. Just to look at her, her eyes are so sad," she said. "She even says, ‘You don’t forget it. You live it every single day.’ I can’t even imagine that."
Such sadness was equally felt by her own students. After several weeks spent seeing the faces of the Holocaust, the emotions in Ms. Collier’s classroom went from shock to anger, but the prevailing feeling was extreme sadness.
"I think they also experienced real-world shock," she said. "They didn’t realize people could do this to one another."
The Holocaust may give them a glimpse into the climate of Nazi Germany, but Ms. Collier does not want her students to leave the lessons of the atrocity in the textbook.
From the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II to the genocide of about 800,000 citizens of Rwanda in 1994, she wants to show them how intolerance has led to violence and death beyond the Holocaust.
"I would never tell the kids it could never happen again," said Ms. Collier. "Here’s a historical perspective, but history repeats itself."