John Haynes, Melanie Handy, and Lisa Mortenson all teach high school students for Guilford County Schools. But now they have something else in common: they all teach high school kids.
Handy, an English teacher at Greensboro’s James B. Dudley High School, said, “It’s not religious at all, but it’s very close to that.” “Those sites make you so open and vulnerable, and it’s a great way to bond.”
They went to Poland over the summer with dozens of other public school teachers from North Carolina to learn about the history of the Holocaust there. They put themselves in the shoes of their kids and became the students for eight days.
Mortenson teaches AP European History and World History at Grimsley High School. “It was a week of just intense everything,” he said. “Strong feelings.” Very intense feelings. A lot of work on this one subject.
Mortenson, Haynes, and Handy went to Poland in the middle of June with 33 other North Carolina public school teachers to learn about the history of the Holocaust. They were there for eight days. All of them had studied the subject before, but never in this way.
“You can feel the pain when you’re there instead of just reading about it,” Handy said. “That energy is still there when you walk into those places where people were.”
Fred Guttman, a former Rabbi, led the teachers. Lee Holder, a social studies teacher at North Lenoir High School and a member of the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust, was also there.
They went on tours of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek, which were all prison camps. They also went to different places in Warsaw, Lublin, and Krakow, as well as the town of Tykocin, where over two days, 3,000 Jews were shot and killed in the forest.
People told them stories about men, women, and children who lived and died in the same places where they were listening and learning now, years later. They also learned about people who fought back.
“Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel said that when you hear a witness, you become a witness,” Guttman said. “That was easy back when there were a lot of Holocaust survivors who could talk about it…” It is because of this trip that these 36 teachers are witnesses.
They are determined to use what they learned in their own classes.
“One thing you notice is how close people who weren’t Nazis were when you’re there.” It was clear to them. It was clear to them. It smelled good.
“They could feel it,” Haynes, who teaches AP World History at The Early College and Guilford, said. “And that’s not to throw stones.” In fact, it’s not true. It’s to show my students that it’s hard to be in that kind of position.
Nazi Germany and its allies killed six million Jews and millions of other people across Europe from 1941 to 1945.
Mortenson said, “One thing I’m really determined to do is not make it one flat story.” “To really include different lives and points of view that changed over time based on the person.” I believe it is very important to avoid telling only one story about the Holocaust.
There are a lot of things going on in the world today that remind me of the Holocaust. I don’t want to compare them to the Holocaust. Haynes said, “It’s still there.”
“So I want to get them to look around, be aware, and do something, even if it’s just a little something.” What can a 14- or 15-year-old do to improve the world and maybe stop a future mass murder?