Reaching Students

CEO of the Shoah Foundation Doug Greenberg told HowStuffWorks, "For a long time, people said, '...this is just stuff about the Holocaust, and you say that what you're really about is overcoming prejudice, intolerance and bigotry. But it's really just about the Holocaust and it's not really going to connect with kids who don't personally connect with the Holocaust, who aren't Jewish.'" They were wondering how the Foundation would use the visual histories to truly turn the survivors and witnesses into teachers. How was the Shoah Foundation going to go about addressing the big problem, which is not the Holocaust but instead is racism and violence?

Photo courtesy Shoah Foundation Students accessing the Visual History Archive via Internet2

The answer to this can be seen in the many educational programs and products the Foundation has created. With 10 documentaries and 16 educational tools already under its belt and more on the way, the Shoah Foundation has a lot to be proud of. In the next section, we'll take a look at two examples of their work.

From the Shoah Foundation Giving Voice - Classroom Video Giving Voice weaves the first-person interviews of seven, diverse teenagers with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses from the Shoah Foundation archive. Broken Silence - International Documentary Series Broken Silence consists of five foreign language films featuring testimonies from Holocaust survivors now living in Argentina and Uruguay, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. One Human Spirit - Video This 23-minute classroom video weaves together the thought-provoking testimony of 25 survivors, punctuated with relevant quotes from political leaders, historical figures, and poets. The Last Days - Documentary Hungary was the last country invaded by German forces in World War II; within months, the Nazis had deported more than 435,000 Hungarian Jews. The Last Days gives the personal accounts of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors, along with those of liberators, historians and other eye-witnesses. Survivors of the Holocaust - Documentary In this film, more than 20 Holocaust survivors share their memories of pre-war life, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and their own struggles to begin life anew after the war. Erinnern - German CD-ROM In a CD-ROM designed especially for German-speaking students, German survivors and others with experiences spanning 1918 to 1948 encourage critical discussion of the Holocaust within a larger context of German history. The Lost Children of Berlin - Documentary Fifty-four years after the Gestapo shut down the last Jewish school in war-torn Berlin, former students traveled from around the world to reunite at that newly re-opened school, many unaware of which classmates had survived. Schindler's List - DVD Release A moving, 77-minute documentary entitled "Voices From the List" offers never-before-seen testimonies from the Shoah Foundation archive of Schindler survivors as they recount their real-life experiences with the man who saved their lives. The DVD also features "The Shoah Foundation Story" with Steven Spielberg, a behind-the-scenes look at the work and accomplishments of the Shoah Foundation. Source: Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation