A VIRTUAL TEACHERS’ GUIDE TO THE HOLOCAUST
by Michelle Bienias
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the labor leaders, and I did not speak out because I was not a labor leader. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me."
The Reverend Martin Niemöller, a pastor in the German Confessing Church who spent seven years in a concentration camp.
I remember as a child seeing for the first time WWII footage of the Allies liberation of the concentration camps. The images of starving men, near death, mere bundles of bones, alongside images of carts filled with skeletons, hit me like a strong kick in the stomach. My reaction was so physical, and I was so stunned to learn of something so heinous occurring in our recent past, that I became deeply absorbed by this subject for the rest of my life. It was only years later, as a teenager, that I learned from my father that his brother, a Polish priest, had died at Dacchau. While my father would never reveal anything further, if he even knew anything more I don’t know, but I knew I had to see these places for myself someday. Unfortunately, that day has yet to come, but when we discovered this site, we were – for lack of a better term – ‘blown away’ by the wealth of information it contains…even more so when we discovered all the VRs!
Look at Auschwitz’s Wall of Death , where prisoners were executed next to the Death Block housing prisoners condemned to death by starvation. Or the VRs of Treblinka, destroyed by the Nazis before the end of the War and now the site of a huge memorial consisting of 17,000 rocks representing lost Jewish communities. And the Birkenau Quarantine Section Barracks, where 1,000 prisoners were housed in a space designed for 52 horses, will make even those not troubled with claustrophobia shiver in horror. (All of the QTVRs are provided in both small and large download size.)
The site is vast: Galleries contain over 3,000 photographs and paintings (see the Ghetto Ration Card entitling holders to 300 daily calories, and the sub-section detailing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising); Movie Clips-- in Quicktime -- of archival footage and survivor stories; and Documents containing primary source material, such as excerpts from Mein Kampf, reports on medical experiments on prisoners and various correspondence. There is also a Glossary of related terms, Bibliographies of Holocaust works, an Art section (including Ghetto art and Nazi-approved art) and even a Music section with samples of Ghetto music as well as ‘Nazi’ music. And so much more.
This amazingly detailed, thorough and moving website was produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT), part of the University of South Florida. Its stated mission is to provide leadership, instructional materials and support services to educational institutions with the aim of integrating technology into K-20 education. It’s Director, Roy Winkelman, tells me that they have another 40 VRs that will be online by the time this is published. Find the new VRs here.
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