- Holocaust Memorial Center

Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
The
Anne Frank
Curriculum
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Contents and Guidelines For Educators
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About this Curriculum
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Holocaust Memorial Center, and follow-up activities
to best use this powerful and influential piece of
literary history.
Teaching history should be more than preservation
of the past. It should be an attempt to safeguard
against the idiom, “history repeats itself,” and to
ensure that people learn from the mistakes and
tragedies of times past. However, reciting the events
of a historical narrative is often only the beginning
of historical understanding. In the case of Holocaust
history especially, learning the events and surrounding
circumstances of Nazi atrocities is not a complete
education. Fostering student understanding of such
unimaginable events is complex and personalized
connectivity can be difficult to generate.
This guide includes the following materials, to be used
as a curriculum for teaching Anne Frank: The Diary of
a Young Girl.
n Pre-visit Holocaust reading suggestions for
educators, and HMC-endorsed curricula for
pre‑visit in-class work
n Guidelines for touring the Museum with students,
and incorporation of the theme of rescue
n Post-visit curriculum, printable classroom material,
and suggested classroom activities
The use of personal materials, such as Anne Frank’s
diary, has long been considered an appropriate and
effective method for introducing and connecting
students to the Holocaust. The value in such material
(aside from the quality of work found in diaries
and memoirs) is in the formation of a personal
connection between student and victim. This helps to
ground the idea of the Holocaust, to create a deeper
understanding of events and their effects on people.
© 2013 Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
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Before you begin, please examine all provided
materials, as a firm grounding in the subject and
readings will improve the learning experience for you
and for your students. We suggest several sources in
the first section, to be used as education guidelines, as
well as for your personal understanding of the history
of the Holocaust as an educator.
Artifacts like Anne Frank’s diary are only truly helpful
in developing an understanding of the Holocaust for
young people if they are properly placed in the context
of the greater events of the Second World War and the
Holocaust. It is your responsibility as an educator to
provide this context, a difficult task that we hope to
simplify with the use of this curriculum.
Before such an understanding can be created,
however, students must be provided an introduction
to the Holocaust, how it came about, and the people
who were involved. For that reason, the Holocaust
Memorial Center (HMC) has put together this
curriculum, intended to guide educators through
teaching The Diary of Anne Frank, fitted properly
within an introduction to the Holocaust, a visit to the
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Photo by Anne Frank Fonds/An
ne
Frank House via Getty Imag
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Suggested Readings and Curricula for Pre-Visit In-Class Work
Before visiting the Museum with your students, it is important that you introduce them to the concepts of
acceptance and diversity, and to the existence of the Jewish religion and culture as well as the Holocaust. It is
best that the visit to the Holocaust Memorial Center not be your students’ first introduction to these subjects,
but that some preparation takes place in the classroom prior to your visit.
Although several states in the USA have mandated teaching of the Holocaust and shared curricula, Michigan
is not yet among them. If you and your school have not yet chosen a curriculum for your general Holocaust
education, please consult one of the following recommended curricula. You may also seek out state-provided
curricula from outside of Michigan, many of which are available at the Holocaust Memorial Center Library.
olkosky, Sidney M., Ellias, Betty Rotberg, Harris, David. Life Unworthy of Life: A Holocaust Curriculum.
n B
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for the Study of the Child, 1987.
choes and Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust. New York, NY: Anti-Defamation
n E
League, 2005.
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© 2013 Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
Below you will find approved curricula for teaching about the Holocaust. You will also find a list of suggested
reading materials for you as an educator, to ground your own Holocaust knowledge. As with most subjects, there
is no single book that can fully educate you about the Holocaust. We have therefore compiled a list of works
with several purposes in mind, to provide a general understanding of the Holocaust and specific contextual
readings relevant to specialized areas of interest. We strongly suggest that you read a general Holocaust overview,
as well as at least one of the specialized histories, to give you a deeper understanding of the aspect of the subject
which interests you the most. If you learn and are genuinely interested yourself, then your own interest and
enthusiasm for history will be passed on to the students you educate.
*
General Reading about
the Holocaust
Philosophy:
rankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning.
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Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1959.
Please read one of the books listed below:
n B
erenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know.
Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.
ve Garrard and Geoffrey Scarre, editors. Moral
n E
Philosophy and the Holocaust. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003.
avidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews.
n D
New York, NY: Holt, Reinhart and Wilson, 1975.
Jewish History:
imont, Max I. Jews, God, and History. New
n D
York, NY: Penguin Books, 1962.
riedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews,
n F
1935-1945 (Abridged Edition). New York, NY:
Harper Perennial, 2009.
n S cheindlin, Raymond P. A Short History of the
Jewish People: From Legendary Times to Modern
Statehood. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
riedman, Saul S. A History of the Holocaust.
n F
Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2004.
Memoir and Literature
Secondary Holocaust Reading
by Subject
evi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York,
n L
NY: Touchstone, 1996.
Please read one of the books below, from
an area in which you are most interested:
n S piegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New
York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1986.
The Final Solution:
n Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York, NY: Hill and
Wang, 1985.
*
rowning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve
n B
Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1992.
Rescue and Resistance
eis, Miep and Gold, Allison Leslie. Anne Frank
n G
Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who
Helped to Hide the Frank Family. New York, NY:
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009.
rowning, Christopher. Origins of the Final
n B
Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy,
September 1939-March 1942. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
and-Weber, Ellen. To Save a Life: Stories of
n L
Holocaust Rescue. Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2007.
ershaw, Ian. Hitler, the Germans, and the Final
n K
Solution. London: Yale University Press, 2009.
n Tec, Nechama. Resilience and Courage: Women,
Men and the Holocaust. New York, NY:
R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 2003.
© 2013 Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
The Camps:
eig, Konnilyn G. Hitler’s Death Camps: The
n F
Sanity of Madness. New York, NY: Holmes &
Meier Publishers, Inc., 1981.
utman, Yisrael and Michael Berenbaum.
n G
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
ees, Laurence. Auschwitz: A New History. New
n R
York, NY: PublicAffairs Press, 2005.
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HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL CENTER
Zekelman Family Campus
28123 Orchard Lake Road • Farmington Hills, MI 48334-3738
248.553.2400 www.holocaustcenter.org
Thank you to the Jewish Women’s Foundation of
Metropolitan Detroit for funding this curriculum.
www.twitter.com/HolocaustMI
© 2013 Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus
www.facebook.com/hmczfc
Additional support was provided by the Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit’s Alliance for Jewish Education.
2013-07R