Section 3 Teachers' Notes

This activity is potentially highly controversial because of the inclusion of the following two statements:

• Every citizen should be white
• Every citizen should be Christian.

These statements are there in order to tease out the opinions of those who believe these views in order for the teacher and other students to challenge them according to the principles of a fair discussion established at the beginning of working with this resource.  If you feel uncomfortable including these statements, delete them.

If you do include these statements and you have students who express the belief that citizens of the UK should be white and Christian, you may wish to refer back to the activities in Section 2 – An Enquiry into Fascism / Thinking about Nationality and Identity.  In this section students explored the fact that people can have multiple identities and that a democratic society, such as we live in, is based on pluralist principles of tolerance and respect of difference.  Fascist societies, by contrast, violently suppress such differences and the dangers of so doing is one of the lessons to be learned from using this resource.

It is essential that you give space to discuss the outcomes of their group discussions.  If you are using the Circle Time model for structuring your lessons (see Teachers’ Notes to entire resource), the statement sorting activity would constitute the ‘Ice breaker’, the feedback would be the ‘Warming Up’ stage and the whole group discussion would constitute the ‘Opening Up’ stage.

You may wish to have a chart ready and photocopied for students to work from for this activity.  To answer the follow-up questions, students would have needed to completed activities in Section 1 An Enquiry into Racism / Purpose of the Racial Laws and Picturing the Reality.

Rather than all students reading through all extracts, you may wish to print off and cut up each extract giving different ones to different groups to read and discuss.  You can then give opportunities for students to report back their findings to the whole class.

The final question in this section suggests students find out about what other countries, such as Britain, knew about what was happening.  For more information see ‘Britain and the Holocaust’ published by HET.

This activity requires an understanding of the meaning of ‘indifference’.  Whilst there is a definition of the term after the quotation, you may wish to brainstorm with the class times when they have felt indifferent towards someone or something.

The quote refers to the ‘road to Auschwitz being paved…’.  The language is metaphorical and as with Section 2: Activity 5 The Milgram Experiment, you may wish to clarify the differences between literal and metaphorical meanings.  If this seems a diversion from the focus of the work, leave it out.

As with Section 2 Activity 1, rather than simply reading through these facts, a more interactive approach would be to photocopy them enlarged onto A3 paper, cut them up, distribute them to the students who then walk around the room telling three others the fact on their paper.  After 5 minutes each student feeds back two new facts they have learned about rescuers during the Holocaust.  There are 15 facts so two sets of photocopies should suffice for an average class of 30.

This information could then be transferred to a wall display.  For images of rescuers to supplement this information see the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website (www.ushmm.org).

You could suggest all students work through all three examples of rescuers.  Alternatively, you could organise your class to work in groups of three and give one rescuer to each student to research then report back to the group.  A different approach again would be to divide your class into six groups of five and give the same rescuer to two groups each then the whole class share what they have learned at the end.

It is suggested that you enlarge the chart to A3.

The first part of this activity is fairly straightforward. The follow-up question, however, requires students to differentiate between fact and opinion.  Depending on the group, this task may require some supplementary input.