Week 7: The Holocaust

We opended class with a video of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.  The collapse happened in our own backyard while America was still at peace but Europe was already involved in WWII.  Even though it had nothing to do with the war, it was relevant to the time period and caused America's engineers to make some significant strides in their designs and ideas that probably had some impact on the structures built for WWII when America joined in 1941.

http://youtu.be/j-zczJXSxnw

Near the end of the video, our class simulation began.  A German authority banged into our classroom and demanded everyone's name, birth date, religion, and ethnicity.  Then gave everyone a gold star they were required to wear pinned onto their clothes.

After the German left, we learned a bit more about the Holocaust.  It was a "systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators."

We learned a little about the concentration camps and the death camps.  Children under 12 were sent to the gas chambers upon arriving at Auschwitz unless they were a twin.  They kept the twins for medical experimentation.  The Nazis used the people in the camps as forced/slave labor in the factories for the German war effort.  Those that were too old, young, or sick to work were sent to the gas chambers and replaced with new arrivals to the camps.  

Then we started our book discussion of The Hiding Place.  As we were discusing, the German came back and scared us enough that we decided we should find a place to hide.  We found our hiding spot and practiced getting to it quickly.  Then we set up General Paige as our lookout in case the German came back.  Then we went back to our book discussion...sort of.  We were all a little nervous and rattled so it was hard to do anything that resembled normal.  When the German came back, we had enough warning that everyone was able to hide and the German found nothing.  That was the end of our simulation and we had a debrief of the simulation mixed with the rest of the discussion of our book.  

We finished up with our journals.  The prompts were:  How were you changed by today's simulation?  What did you learn about yourself?  What are you going to do differently from now on?

HOMEWORK:

• Write a short paper on a "Righteous Gentile."   http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations
• Keep working on your personal Hero Projects
• Start reading Hiroshima
• How are those movies coming??
• Interviews??

Next Week:  The Allied Leaders