Second Term

Citizenship + English + History + Art

Week 1 - 3

• Teacher elicits a definition of Holocaust and starts a debate around that topic to understand how much is known by the group. Follow-up activities prepare the students for the “March of the Living” which will take place on 27^th January:

→ Students watch short videos about the horrors of the Holocaust;

• Some students prepare a plain PowerPoint presentation on a handful of 2^nd World War heroes (Anne Frank, Miep Gies, Irena Sendler, Aristides de Sousa Mendes). The idea is not to go too deep into these people’s lives, but to raise awareness of the power of individual actions;

→ Students watch the film “The Pianist” in the History class;

→ Students help make 70 white flowers in the Art lesson and prepare a banner to be taken on the march (other classes will help too);

→ An art teacher of the school makes some badges with the Star of David for the march; we also make some posters to be put up at school and in the Municipal Library, along with some Bookmarks with the poem “First they came”;

→ Some certificates are made to be given to the students who participate on the march;

→ Our “March of the Living” was registered on the site: http://70.auschwitz.org/

 

• Unexpectedly, other students and teachers showed a big interest in joining us on our march and so, when the day came, instead of the seventy students we had in mind, we ended up having almost double that!

Week 4 (27^th January)

Students and teachers meet by the school gate. They are handed out the badges and the flowers – 70 in total to symbolize the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The march begins – at the front, two students hold a banner where one can read the purpose of our march. We walk to the Municipal Library (about one and a half kilometers) where the Town hall Counsellor, the director of the Library and some more representatives will be waiting for us. When we get there, we hand in the 70 white flowers (more than one metre tall each) and place them, in the form of an upright bouquet, in a central part of the library together with the banner. First some students and then a teacher read out some poems. We hand in some bookmarks and poems and walk back to school.