"Dear Colleague" Letter |
Director |
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|
NATIONAL |
DIVISION OF EDUCATION PROGRAMS |
Dr. Norma J. Hervey
Professor Emerita of History
Luther College
700 College Drive
Decorah, IA 52101
Telephone: 563-387-1806
Fax: 563-387-1107: Attention Chelle Meyer
herveynj@luther.edu
2008 NEH SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR SCHOOL TEACHERS
MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON THE HOLOCAUST
Sites: U.S. Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC. Josefov, Prague, Terezin Concentration Camp and Cesky Raj, Czech Republic. Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp for Women, Fuerstenberg, Germany. Jewish History Museum and Wannsee House, Berlin.
Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, Oswiecim, Poland.
Dear Colleague:
Thank you for your interest in the five-week Summer Institute on the Holocaust sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Luther College. The program will be held in Central Europe after the participants meet in Washington, DC to spend a few days at the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Education Department. This will also allow us to benefit from group travel rates to Europe. You will need to organize your travel from your home base to Washington and back.
Interest in teaching and learning about the Holocaust has accelerated during the past decades. After the initial shock of liberation of the few survivors and the trials of a few of the perpetrators, the Holocaust was ignored or forgotten to a great extent. This is not surprising given the physical devastation of Europe, large numbers of displaced persons, and the critical needs to rebuild infrastructures, communities, and lives. The Cold War soon became the primary challenge of the postwar era and the issues and legacies of the Holocaust were neglected or ignored. The children and grandchildren of the war generation raised these issues in Germany in the 1960’s and 1970’s, questioning the actions of their parents and grandparents, opening a new door to Holocaust studies in Europe. Most of the concentration camps had been opened in various stages of restoration to allow survivors and others to visit them but the Holocaust had been essentially relegated to a paragraph or two in textbooks in the United States even as survivors and scholars created a literature of the history and challenged every academic discipline, not only literature, history, religion, or psychology. Voices had been raised earlier. Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Ivan Klima and others wrote significant works that demanded that readers confront that past, not just the lives of victims, but also of perpetrators, not only the military and SS but also civilians, and the responses of all nations, not just Germany. Slowly but steadily the swell of publications, motion pictures, and visitors to camp sites grew. Scholarly works began to recover the stories of prisoners, guards, communities, and nations. Major exhibits, new museums, and memorials were created and educational programs developed for teachers and students at camps across Europe. Western European nations developed curriculums to teach Holocaust history and the consequences of “the final solution.” Tony Judt, Postwar Europe, posits the thesis in his “Epilogue,” that the Europe of today, the European Union, is a response to the Holocaust. From Scandinavia, England, France, Belgium, Holland, etc., in addition to Germany and Austria, teachers attended workshops and seminars at camp sites where excellent educational programs were developed and major archives organized. Terezin, Czech Republic, Dachau, Ravensbrueck, Sachsenhausen, Germany, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Poland and a remarkable number of other sites were soon names recognized by students and adults around the world. Events commemorating World War II anniversaries were international news. A New York Times article, February, 2006, described a current disagreement between Germany and the United States on the more than fifteen miles of documents about 17.5 million people collected after the war which are still sealed. New works, documentaries, and films will certainly continue to challenge teachers, parents, and students.
The Holocaust museums in Washington, DC and Jerusalem and around the world are not only memorials but also schools. The opening of the Jewish History Museum in Berlin a few years ago is another example of the growth of available scholarly sources and educational opportunities. All of this attests to the ongoing interest and need for Americans as we seek to teach and understand what it means after the Holocaust to be human.
Director’s Background and Interests
After a visit to Baba Yar in Kiev in 1992 and my first experience at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1994, I developed a January term course on the Holocaust on site for Luther College students. I have taught it for ten years now. My PhD is in U.S. History with focus on immigrants, migrants, and refugees. While I was an undergraduate student, I worked with copies of the original Nuremberg Trial documents, an experience which haunted me thereafter. I also hold an MA degree in Russian and Soviet history and have taught two years in the Czech Republic, at Palackeho University and Charles University. I am presently on my second Fulbright appointment at Moldova State University in Chisinau, Moldova, a battleground of the second world war.
The many remarkable scholars who are participating in this Institute will be briefly introduced as the program is described.
Institute Program and Optional Academic Credit
The preliminary reading, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, edited by John Roth and Michael Berenbaum (1989) will be shipped to participants in May. The volume includes essays by both editors plus works by Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski, and Terence Des Pres, all of whom survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as by many other scholars such as Robert J. Lifton, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology. The Institute syllabus is in five units with at least one common reading in each. Three units are based on different monographs, each of which will be read by one-third of the group to allow us to work in small groups. The topics are anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Christianity, and Justice and Laws. The fifth unit is an effort to summarize relevance to the present.
The Institute program begins June 26 with two days at the US Holocaust Museum. We are presently selecting affordable housing in DC. Stephen Feinberg, Director, National Outreach for Teacher Initiatives, will share the programs developed at the museum; you will also have time to explore. Holocaust survivor, Nesse Godin, a wonderful speaker and remarkable woman, will spend half a day with us to share her story and answer questions. There will be a reception the first evening at the Museum. We depart from Washington’s Dulles Airport on June 28 and will arrive in Prague on the 29th. You will share double rooms in a dormitory. Indeed, all of our accommodations are double rooms as that is all that is available and will help to control costs. A typical Czech breakfast is included, bread, meat, cheese, yogurt, cereal and coffee or tea. Czech historian, Dr. Karel Konecny, will join us in Prague and will participate in the program. We will offer individual consultation and lead smaller group discussions. Individual conferences will be scheduled from the outset to discuss goals of each participant. There will also be one on one conferences at Auschwitz during the final week.
Prague’s medieval Jewish Quarter, Josefov, is a history of anti-Semitism and Jewish life from the middle ages through the Holocaust. Hitler ordered that it be preserved “as a memorial to a vanished race.” The medieval ghetto, its cemetery, City Hall, and multiple synagogues are visible evidence of medieval and modern history. The Pinkus Synagogue is a building of walls, each covered with names commemorating by geographic area Czech Jews, victims of the Holocaust, listing names, birth dates and dates and sites of deaths. The primary collection of the children’s art work from the Terezin Ghetto are displayed here along with contemporary children’s art inspired by the original works. We will visit Josefov on Monday. June 30. The afternoon allows time for readings in Unit I. The common reading, “The Jew,” from Mosse’s Crisis in German Ideology, provides a forum to discuss the incredible transition from Germany’s role as a world leader in universities from the 19th century to acceptance by educated Germans of Nazi ideology and actions in the 20th. July 1 we will continue reading; in the afternoon and evening; small group discussions on the texts will be followed by shared summaries of each group and further discussion by the whole group. On July 2, we will tour the five sections of Prague One, the old city and then enjoy free time.
On July 3, our chartered bus will take us to Terezin, the show camp used to deceive the Red Cross during the war and the camp supposedly created for Jewish leaders, especially those awarded the Iron Cross for service to Germany during World War I. We will visit the ghetto and the camp; the museum has original films on both sites and the history of the community whose residents were removed in order to create the ghetto. During the war the prison provided torture chambers and an execution site of political prisoners. It also served as headquarters for the SS, as a work camp, and as the transit camp from which more than one million people were shipped by rail to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Major Holocaust scholar, Dr. John Roth, will join us before we leave Prague. He will spend two days with us at the Parkhotel, a lodge in a national park and forest in northern Bohemia, Cesky Raj. We will have time to walk on the forest trails, to climb the stairs through the magnificent rock formations, to read, to talk and to learn from Dr. Roth’s seminars, to ask questions and to discuss them. Dr. Roth will speak about his work, including his newest and forthcoming works on the second morning; his earlier work will be the focus of our first morning. The final unit of our syllabus is comprised of common readings, including Roth’s 2005 monograph, Ethics During and After the Holocaust.
E-mail is available at Internet Cafes in every venue with the exception of Cesky Raj. Some sites provide computers; others do not. Our accommodations also vary in this respect but there are only limited numbers of machines. You may wish to bring your own laptop computer but connections to the internet are not easily accessible. Specific information will be provided later.
On July 6 we will travel to the Ravensbrueck Work Camp for Women in Germany. Participants will have the opportunity to research the archives on life in the camp, to find the biography of a prisoner or of one of the infamous female SS guards, famed for their brutality. Dr. Matthias Heyl, director of the Museum, is a highly respected scholar whose expertise and publications focus on pedagogy and have been published in English, German, and Japanese. Heyl and Cordula Hoffman, the archivist, will introduce the history and the resources available on our arrival the evening of July 6. We will stay on site where recently built accommodations and meals are provided at reasonable cost. On our first full day, Monday July 7, we will meet all of the staff and begin our workshop by exploring stories. Resources available include documents, films, photos, and drawings, all with English translations. Participants will have access to ten computers, four digital cameras, and a digital film camera to create materials for classrooms. After a full day of individual research, the first participants will present their work. After dinner, the 2005 documentary film, “The Women of Ravensbrueck” will be presented by its director, Lorett Walz. After the ninety minute film, Dr. Heyl, Dr. Konecny and I will moderate small group discussions about the film. Our third day here will allow participants to complete and discuss their work.
After breakfast the next morning, July 9, we will transfer to Teikyo University in a suburb of Berlin, a short trip, stopping en route to visit Sachsenhausen, the site of the medical experiments and incarceration of intellectuals. We will finish Unit II readings and have time for discussion. We will spend July 10, 11, and 14 at Berlin’s Jewish History Museum. The architecture is an education in itself. Shaped to resemble a bolt of lightening, the architect incorporated an isolation room that allows traffic and people’s voices to be heard by each person alone in the small, dark room, a tower with faces at the bottom which cry out to visitors as they visit the exhibits and then enter the base to walk on the faces crying for help and, outside the tower, a forest maze of trees encased in concrete, another place to discover isolation and fear. Our days at the museum are planned by the archivist, Aubrey Pomerance, Head of the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, Tanja Groenke, Head of the Education program, and very knowledgeable guides to introduce us to the exhibits our first day, offering participants opportunities to explore other camps in film, photos, and English texts.
Saturday, July 12th, we will visit downtown Berlin, the Reichstag, the Brandenberg Gate, the German memorial to Holocaust victims, Checkpoint Charlie, remains of the Berlin Wall and other exhibits – this is your time to see whatever you wish. We will help you figure out logistics. After an evening in Berlin, we will spend Sunday at Teikyo, catching up on reading, discussing our readings and Jewish History Museum experiences. You may have time to begin Unit III, all common, short readings on Christianity and the Holocaust published in the reader. Monday we will finish our sessions at the Jewish History Museum.
July 15 we begin three working sessions at the Wannsee House. This is where Nazi leaders, led by Heydrich, planned the means to achieve “the final solution.” The German high command had learned from Babi Yar and sites in Poland, Romania, and elsewhere that it is not easy to kill a large number of people, dispose of their bodies, and collect their belongings for use in Germany. The trucks used to gas victims required hands on removal and disposal of bodies by living people. Soldiers objected to such chores. The search for a less traumatic way for Germans to kill millions was the first order of business at Wannsee. Unit IV readings focus on justice and law. Elke Gryglewski, scholar and senior teacher at Wannsee, is creative and inspiring; I always learn a great deal from her. We will work at Wannsee three days; the first day will be a full one; the others four hours each. The remainder of the time will be spent reading and discussing the texts on law and justice.
On July 18, we will travel to Krakow, Poland to have a free week-end in this beautiful city; participants may visit the Medieval Cloth Market in the square, an art museum with an original DaVinci, the Wawal Castle, the Marianske Basilica and the trumpeter of Krakow, the Salt Mines, or Oskar Schindler’s factory if they wish. We will stay in a small hotel in Krakow for two nights. Monday we will spend the day with Wojciech Smolen, a respected scholar whose introductions to the camps of Auschwitz I and II (Birkenau) are internationally renowned. He has spoken to NGO’s, governments, and divisions of the UN. We will see the original crematorium and death wall in Auschwitz I where the offices of the SS, the cells of prisoners to be interrogated, indescribable quantities of human belongings collected at the site where shoes, hairbrushes, suitcases, toothbrushes, human hair, cyclon B canisters and more are exhibited. Most of the materials in museums across the world came from Auschwitz and tons of items were shipped to Germany to be used during the war; the quantities testify to the scale of the operations.
In the afternoon, we will visit Auschwitz II or Birkenau. Auschwitz III, the factories of the Nazis where prisoners labored to create war materials has not been restored. The camp, Birkenau, was blown up by the Nazis in a vain attempt to hide the Holocaust before they marched most surviving prisoners to Germany. The murders continued en route until the war ended. The four crematoria and gas chambers were dynamited, the first by the prisoners in an effort to stop the killings early in 1944. In visits to Majdanek, where the ovens were not destroyed, I discovered that the ruins at Birkenau are more effective visually than the smaller, intact gas chambers. The size and space present a clear picture of the realities of Auschwitz. The famous train ramp where prisoners were unloaded to be sent, by a mere hand gesture, to immediate death or to labor assignments to be worked to death, are known to all of us. Pregnant women, the elderly, the ill, children, the handicapped walked from the train to the gas chambers as shown in one of the preliminary readings “They Walked On.” Those selected to work or for experiments were housed in barracks divided by ethnic identity and gender or, in the case of Dr. Mengele’s twins, housed separately. The Roma camp was the only one which allowed family grouping. The slave labor camps for Poles and other defeated peoples had more space and privileges such as athletic fields to compensate for the realities of daily life and to benefit from their labor. Birkenau is an immense and haunting place surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire.
Our final unit includes several short items in the reader and John Roth’s book mentioned earlier. The scholar in charge of our work at Auschwitz is Alicija Bialecka, the chief archivist who teaches in Israel, the U.S., and all over Europe. Again, participants will be able to research individual and other stories to use in presentations and teaching. We are staying close to the camp so that we can save time and money but also so everyone can set their own schedules for reading and research. On July 28, we return to Prague to leave for the United State on July 29.
The NEH provides certificates for teachers participating in Institutes; I will provide full details on the content and work of the Institute for you to present to accrediting agencies. I will explore academic credit from Luther College for anyone who requests it but you should know that the tuition may be considered to be costly.
Costs and Stipends
The National Endowment for the Humanities provides a $3600 stipend per person to help participants to pay for living and travel expenses for five week Summer Institutes The present decline of the dollar and the increase in costs due to gasoline and food prices may be a major challenge. At the time of writing this letter to you, I am unable to project total costs, many of them dependent on your choices, i.e., meals. Breakfasts are provided. But you should plan $15.00 to $20.00 per day for other meals. We are visiting some very expensive cities; our accommodations, double rooms, are basic but clean. The accommodations at the camp sites are relatively new. Participants have options regarding meals in every place. Books and group admissions are covered by the budget. Participants are responsible for monitoring the exchange rates before they apply to determine insofar as possible if overseas travel is feasible for them in summer, 2008.
This Institute is on very intense topics; it is important for all involved to be supportive of each other and ready to walk off and/or share some of the more difficult experiences. We are going to do a great deal in a limited time so be prepared for the challenges. We will be walking and on our feet much of the time so comfortable walking shoes are a necessity. We also have three full days of travel by bus in order to visit the sites, Cesky Raj to Ravensbrueck, Berlin to Krakow, Oswiecim to Prague. There are also shorter trips of a few hours each, Prague to Terezin and Cesky Raj, Krakow to Oswiecim. We will use the bus in Berlin to avoid transfers on public transportation for planned activities. The U-bahn and buses will allow you to go into the city as you wish at other times. In Prague and Krakow, we will walk and use public transportation.
Applications and Deadlines
Detailed application information accompanies this letter. Should you wish to apply to this Institute, your completed application must be postmarked no later than March 3, 2008. It should be addressed to me as follows:
Norma J. Hervey
History Department, NEH Institute
Luther College
Koren Hall
700 College Drive
Decorah, IA 52101
The most important part of the application is your four page essay. It should include relevant personal and academic information, your reasons for wishing to participate in the Institute, your interests, academic and personal, in the Holocaust, your qualifications, and the contributions you will make to the Institute, and how the Institute relates to your teaching and career objectives. The Institute is a study of literature focused on the history of anti-Semitism, the planning and execution of the Holocaust, the role of the churches, the postwar Nuremberg trials and laws, and the ethical and political legacies. The opportunity to grapple with the motivations and beliefs of the perpetrators is central to this study. All faculty are fluent in English; exhibits and readings are also in English. Obviously, anyone familiar with German, Czech, or Polish may request archival materials in those languages but our work utilizes English translations. Anticipated results include continuing opportunity to explore the literature and, perhaps, development of seminars and workshops for local, state and national education association meetings.
If you have questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with me. I will not be in the United States until March. Until then, you can reach me via e-mail, herveynj@luther.edu. You can also contact our secretary, Chelle Meyer, at 563-387-1806 during working hours with logistical questions. My home phone, for reference in the spring, is 563-382-9485; my office 563-387-1190. I will respond to your e-mails as promptly as possible – sometimes the service disappears unexpectedly here but it has always been corrected within the day. I am eager to receive your application and am excited at the formation of a group of teachers to share a unique five weeks, learning from each other, discussing important texts, seeking to deal with the significant and unending questions of the Holocaust. There is an addenda of the dates and locations of the Institute below.
Calendar, 2008
Day 1 DC TH June 26 US Holocaust Museum
Day 2 DC F June 27 US Holocaust Museum
Day 3 DC SA June 28 Departure
Day 4 SU June 29 A.M. arrival Praha
Day 5 M June 30 Josefov
Day 6 TU July 1 Reading and discussion
Day 7 W July 2 A.M. Tour of Old City; P.M. read; concert
Day 8 TH July 3 Terezin. Cesky Raj. Read, hike/walk
Day 9 F July 4 Cesky Raj. John Roth seminars/outdoors.
Day 10 SA July 5 Discussions with John Roth. Read. Walks.
Day 11 SU July 6 Travel to Ravensbrueck. Evening session
Day 12 M July 7 Ravensbrueck 2
Day 13 T July 8 Ravensbrueck 3
Day 14 W July 9 Travel to Berlin/ Sachsenhausen
Day 15 TH July 10 Jewish History Museum 1
Day 16 F July 11 Jewish History Museum 2
Day 17 SA July 12 Downtown Berlin
Day 19 SU July 13 Reading & discussion
Day 20 M July 14 Jewish History Museum 3
Day 21 T July 15 Wannsee House 1
Day 22 W July 16 Wannsee House 2
Day 23 Th July 17 Wannsee House 3
Day 24 F July 18 Travel to Krakow
Day 25 SA July 19 Krakow
Day 26 SU July 20 Krakow a.m. Auschwitz p.m.
Day 27 M July 21 Auschwitz tour
Day 28 T July 22 Auschwitz 2
Day 29 W July 23 Auschwitz 3
Day 30 Th July 24 Auschwitz 4
Day 31 F July 25 Reading and research and consultations
Day 32 SA July 26 Presentations
Day 33 SU July 27 Presentations
Day 34 M July 28 Travel to Prague
Day 35 T July 29 Depart for US
