Our work — 03
Education
Free lessons and assemblies, written to fit inside a Holocaust scheme of work that is already full.
Why schools ask us
Not hostility. A sentence and a half in a textbook.
Holocaust education in England is good by international standards and getting better. The Roma and Sinti Holocaust is usually present in it — as a clause. “Jews, and also Roma, disabled people and others.” A clause is not nothing, but a student who leaves school able to name Auschwitz and unable to say what a Zigeunerfamilienlager was has learned the shape of the history rather than the history.
Teachers know this. What they do not have is an hour to spare or a set of materials they trust. That is the whole of what we provide.
Terror and crime were not the work of a handful of oppressors but of many residents of Gelsenkirchen. The events described here took place in the middle of society.
Anatomy of a session
Sixty minutes, minute by minute
This is the Key Stage 3 lesson as it is actually delivered. It is published in full so that a head of department can judge it without having to book it.
0–10
What do you already think you know?
Students write down what they associate with the word Gypsy. The list is kept and returned to at the end. It is almost always a list of stereotypes, and almost always written by students who would say, correctly, that they are not prejudiced.
10–25
The card index
A police registration card from the 1930s, on the desk. Who filled this in? What does it ask for? What is it for? Students work out, unprompted, that a list of names and addresses is the first step of a deportation.
25–45
What happened
The sequence from registry to camp, kept short and specific. One place, one family where the record allows it. Not a slideshow of atrocity photographs.
45–55
Afterwards
Thirty-seven years of refused compensation. Why the silence lasted, and who benefited from it.
55–60
Back to the list
The list from the first ten minutes comes out again. No lecture. The students do the work.
- In your classroom
- A community educator comes to the school. One lesson or a full day, up to six classes.
- At the monument
- A forty-minute session in the city centre, usually combined with a museum visit.
- Whole-school assembly
- Fifteen minutes, suitable for 27 January or 2 August.
- Twilight session for staff
- Two hours for a history or humanities department, with materials to keep.
- Remote
- Where travel is not possible. Less good, and we will say so, but better than nothing.
Materials
4 resources, free to download and adapt
Lesson plans, a slide pack for assemblies, and a source-work pack for Key Stage 4. Keep the attribution and the source references and do whatever you like with the rest.
For teachers