Holocaust Education Center Prepares Teachers Through Art
A traveling exhibit of art by Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners is at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Illini Hillel’s Cohen Center for Jewish Life housed over 60 pieces of artwork that were on display April 27 through May 4.
Executive Director of the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation Linda Bauer introduced the exhibit at its grand opening on April 27th.
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“Thank you everybody for coming tonight. This is a really amazing exhibit. I have a hard time with this exhibit, but it means a lot to me because my mother survived Auschwitz,” said Bauer.
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The art, made by 12 different artists, was lined up in chronological order on large 6-foot-tall panels. Each painting was filled with vivid colors that told stories of what the prisoners experienced in the concentration camp. Accompanying the art were written testimonials of what was happening in each photo and biographies of each of the artists.
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Grand opening attendees viewing the exhibit
The original art is on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland. The Holocaust Education Center of the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation has been working on bringing the exhibit to the area for two years. It made it's first debut at the Vermilion County Museum in Danville in early March.
Brian Kahn, Co-Director of the Holocaust Education Center, said this exhibit was a perfect fit for the Holocaust Education Center’s mission to help Champaign-Urbana teachers meet the Illinois state mandate to teach about the Holocaust in fifth, eighth, and tenth grade.
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“It’s a perfect fit to show teachers what to do when they plan a holocaust unit – you need to bring in the arts. People drew, people wrote music, it wasn’t just about death and destruction. That was a huge part of it, but people did things to survive," said Kahn.
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Brian Kahn addressing grand opening attendees before entering the exhibit
Kahn and his Co-Director, Bob Lehmann, held a workshop for Champaign-Urbana teachers the Monday before the grand opening of the exhibit. Teacher attendees received an exclusive look at the exhibit and were given materials on how to teach their students about the Holocaust through the artwork.
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Valerie Prescott, a fifth-grade teacher at Barkstall Elementary School in Champaign, attended the workshop and said she would be sharing some of the artwork with her students.
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“I would hope that this gives them insight into an artist’s feelings and what it was like for them. But also, for my students to know themselves that it’s okay to express themselves through artwork,” said Prescott.
This exhibit is just one of the many resources that the Holocaust Education Center makes available to the Champaign-Urbana community, and teachers especially.
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The collection of movies and books that the Holocaust Education center provides for teachers
​According to Lehmann, there are right and wrong ways to teach students about the Holocaust, and it’s important for teachers to know what those are.
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“A lot of times what teachers will do is they will go onto social studies school services and they’ll pick a pre-packaged curriculum unit. Some of those may not be appropriate. Some of them may have simulations or reenactments. I made that mistake when I first started teaching,” said Lehmann.
Lehmann said that when he first began his teaching career, he did a box car simulation with his students. He would tape the dimensions of a box car on the floor and have his students cram into the taped-off box to simulate the box cars that prisoners rode in to concentration camps. Lehmann said this approach is wrong because, not only is it impossible to recreate what the prisoners felt, but it is insulting to the memory of those that suffered.
The Holocaust Education Center steers clear of simulations in the learning materials they offer. Kahn, a former middle school social studies teacher himself, said the center is designed to help teachers through the difficulty of teaching a unit on the Holocaust.
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“It’s such a complicated topic. People weren’t prepared to do it. But now they can be prepared. We're putting it right in front of them. We’re offering them free materials. We're offering to come to their schools,” said Kahn.
Kahn stressed how important it is for children to learn about and understand the Holocaust on a deeper level than watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas or reading The Diary of Anne Frank.
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“It’s not just a holocaust issue. It’s not just a genocide issue. It’s a human rights issue,” said Kahn.
Brett Ashley Kaplan, the Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois, said that Holocaust education is an entrance into teaching students about human rights through past and present genocides.
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“I think it’s very important for us to grasp and understand that genocides keep happening over and over again. The Holocaust is a big one and a very important one that we have to remember. The idea behind remembrance is preventing future genocides from happening,” said Kaplan.
Lehmann said he hopes that The Auschwitz Experience in the Art of Prisoners did exactly that – taught the future generation about the true horror of genocide.
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"One of the catch-all phrases in teaching the Holocaust is 'Never Forget, Never Again.' If you look at the number of genocides that have happened since the Holocaust, we haven't learned that lesson very well. Maybe through people visiting this exhibit, that lesson will hit home and people will be moved enough to stand up and say 'enough is enough,'" said Lehmann.
