Yad Vashem
Echoes & Reflections
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School, High School
COMMON CORE STANDARDS: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening
The purpose of this unit is for students to understand the effects of the Holocaust on its most innocent victims—children—since targeting babies and children was an important step in the attempt by the Nazis to erase the Jews and their future. Students will also research post-Holocaust genocides and analyze children’s rights violations. In addition, students are provided an opportunity to develop a position on whether an event the magnitude of the Holocaust could happen again and to consider the role and responsibility of the individual in seeing that it does not.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the situation that children faced during the Holocaust.
- Discuss both the content and the messages in a clip of visual history testimony.
- Summarize the causes and effects of post-Holocaust genocides.
- Analyze the violation of children’s rights during the Holocaust and during genocides that have taken place since.
- Construct an argument to support whether or not something the magnitude of the Holocaust could happen again.
- Recommend actions that individuals can take to prevent genocide.