“Children in the Ghetto” - Lesson Plans

Content

Rationale

Exposure to the Holocaust at too early a stage and in an unsupervised fashion may lead to trauma in young children, a feeling of detachment from the subject, and even a sense of antagonism. The goal of the "Children in the Ghetto" website and the accompanying lesson plans is to expose young students to the Holocaust in a way that is suitable for them both emotionally and cognitively. By creating empathy in the children, the program hopes to prevent a judgmental approach in the future. The website describes life during the Holocaust through the eyes of the children who lived in the ghettos. It attempts to present this complex experience in a way that is accessible to today's children.

See: Educational Challenges in Teaching the Holocaust

The lesson plans in this guide offer activities for independent learning that relate to several key topics from the "Children in the Ghetto" website. In getting acquainted with this difficult subject, it is important that the students’ work is guided, and that the guidance is provided by a teacher or an adult that the students know well.

Structure

This guide contains three modular lesson plans. The lesson plans can be used as a set or individually.
It is recommended to begin the activity with the "Closure and Isolation" worksheet, which provides background information regarding the containment of the Jews in the ghettos, and then to continue to other subjects of your choosing.
Each lesson begins with a short discussion that presents the subject of the lesson plan and points out specific questions to think about during independent work.
After the opening discussion, worksheets will be distributed and the students will begin their individual work on the "Children in the Ghetto" website. At this point it is recommended to encourage students to work in pairs in order to encourage discussion between students.
Following this stage, you may wish to sum-up with a whole-class summary discussion.
The lesson plans are designed for 90 minutes (two class periods) but can be adapted to fit into a 45 minute period (one class), by reducing the number of tasks to be completed by the students.

Introduction

In the fall of 1939, the Nazis began to confine the Jews into the ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe. With these ghettos, the Nazis intended to isolate the Jews from the rest of the population and to control their lives. The ghettos were usually built in the poorest and most crowded parts of the city. Jews were relocated to these parts of the city and forbidden from leaving. Some of these ghettos were surrounded by walls, thus disconnecting them from the outside world. Jews were forced to leave behind everything they knew and to move into a new and unknown environment, poor and overcrowded. As a result of the move to the ghetto, the children's lives were turned upside down. The home they lived in, the friends they had played with, the schools they had studied in – nothing remained as it was. In addition, the children were often forced to do things that, before the war, only the adults were responsible for – getting food, going to work, providing for the family and more. Being closed into the ghetto not only led to an almost complete separation of the Jews from their surroundings, but also caused difficult living conditions due to overcrowding, starvation and forced labor. Over the course of the ghettos’ existence, this would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Despite the difficult living conditions in the ghetto, Jews tried to maintain a normal routine as much as possible. A variety of educational frameworks were established for the children, often in hiding. Some of the ghettos even contained theaters, and plays were performed for the ghetto's residents. Despite the unbearable conditions that Jews lived in, the children in the ghetto continued playing, writing poetry, drawing pictures and dreaming of better days.