Presentations
E-learning and Internet lessons
Speakers:
-Adam Musiał, International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust
-Levien Rouw and Semra Foric, Anne Frank House
Moderator: Monika Siorek
Adam Musiał, a teacher, educator and interpreter, presented the online lesson he created with Monika Witalis-Malinowska for the e-learning platform of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. This lesson, entitled “Preparation for a visit to Auschwitz – Auschwitz, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp” is intended for teachers to prepare students aged over 13 years old for a visit to the Memorial site.
For him, visiting Auschwitz is a very valuable educational experience through three main characteristics: its authenticity, its tangibility and the possibility of a personal experience (a sensual experience through oral and visual perceptions, and sometimes through olfactory and tactile senses). “All these three characteristics can enhance the cognitive experience, can affect the visitor’s emotions and thus, in a way, further stimulate the cognition of the student coming to a remembrance place. I think that visitors can often feel that a particular remembrance site, the place they are visiting, in a way, speaks to them. This is especially true of places of such liminal and extreme experience as Auschwitz, where the awareness of pain is, or should be, more acute. In a way you might say that the silent traumatic past in such places seems to scream.”
Students need to be prepared for the visit to fully experience the Memorial site and internalize the message it conveys. “Awareness of the past depends on the knowledge you have or you have acquired about the place. You will not hear the past, even in places full of artefacts like Auschwitz, you will not hear the story of these silent reminders of the past if you are not aware that the past happened and how it happened.”
The lesson aims at providing sufficient knowledge to students about what Auschwitz was. The first part, “Auschwitz, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp” is about the processes, ideology and developments that led to the creation of Auschwitz. It explains the Nazism ideology and its implementations. The second part, “Auschwitz, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp” focuses on the tough reality of Auschwitz as a concentration camp and the last part, “Auschwitz, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp” underlines the whole process of extermination. “By the time students come to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, they will have acquired sufficient knowledge to perceive it as a consequence of a series of events that led to it and understand the cause and effect relationship between all these elements. We wish to make students know enough for the silent past of this place to speak to them. So that all the artefacts, the barracks, the gates, the Appellplatz, the ramp and the crematoria could be meaningful to students when they visit them.” An important part of the lesson is also dedicated to reflection on Auschwitz. For Adam Musiał, reflection and debriefing after a visit are not discussed enough; things are not, or only very rarely, considered afterwards.
The lesson is enhanced with many video testimonies, photographs, maps and documentary extracts to support the content.
“The use of those materials was designed to offer the chance for an indirect vicarious kind of meeting with those who lived through Auschwitz, and it is meant to be a sort of intimate encounter with the suffering of this place and people who experienced that suffering.” Concerning testimonies, he said: “We used the testimonies of various survivors, Jewish, Polish, Roma, Dutch and so on and so forth, so that the story of that dehumanizing experience of Auschwitz, in this faceless place, could be re-humanized and given human faces again. So that survivors’ individual stories and their emotions could be placed against the backdrop of the bigger history of this place.” These testimonies offer a more tangible and palpable knowledge of Auschwitz.