Teaching About the Holocaust

When Selene Bruk recently finished recounting her horrific tale of survival in several Nazi concentration camps about 60 years ago, her audience of Catholic school girls from East Los Angeles found one thing hard to believe.

How, they asked, did she keep her faith in God after witnessing so many atrocities and losing so many fellow Jews and family members during the Holocaust?

It was a question that Bruk, now a grandmother living in West Los Angeles, had asked herself many times in her life.

“You cannot give up your faith,” she told them simply, “or your hope.”

That discussion and similarly painful others between the Catholic students and Jewish Holocaust survivors may shape how Catholic educators throughout Southern California teach about one of history’s darkest chapters.

For months, students and teachers from Sacred Heart High School in Lincoln Heights have been working with Los Angeles-area Holocaust survivors to create a curriculum on the Holocaust that, if approved by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, will be offered to more than 50 schools throughout the region.

It has not always been easy for the students to discuss a topic that the Catholic church itself has struggled for decades to come to terms with.

The students have faced such tough questions as why did the church remain silent while 6 million Jews were put to death? How can the church reconcile its silence during these atrocities with the church’s tenet: to love thy neighbor?

The church now must ask itself how it can teach about the Holocaust in a way that strengthens, rather than undermines, the faith of the students.

The local effort comes as the church works worldwide to improve the often strained relations between Catholics and Jews.

Pope John Paul II, who previously acknowledged that European Catholics fell short in efforts to save Jews from the Nazis, made an unprecedented apology Sunday in Rome for the church’s sins over history against a wide range of groups, including Jews. He did not specifically mention the Holocaust but many people took that as part of his message, though some Jewish leaders wanted him to directly address the Vatican’s silence on the Holocaust during World War II.

The efforts at the high school in East Los Angeles are part of a growing trend among Catholic educators nationwide to teach about the Holocaust.

“There are things going on all over,” said Eugene Fisher, who oversees Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference in Washington, D.C.

He noted that Holocaust curricula are being developed in St. Louis and Washington, D.C. He added that Catholic educators increasingly are visiting Holocaust museums with their students.

“It’s something that Catholic educators are very inclined to do,” he said.

Jewish leaders praise that initiative, saying it is among other efforts to help improve understanding between the two faiths.

“We think it’s absolutely wonderful,” said David Lehrer, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, which is working with the Los Angeles archdiocese to create the curriculum.

Last year, more than 1,600 people gathered in the San Fernando Valley for an event organized by the American Jewish Committee and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to listen to scholars and clergy of both faiths to discuss what can be done to build a better relationship.

Students Immersed in the Holocaust

Sacred Heart High School took on the difficult lesson plan after one of its teachers, a self-described activist, recently attended a teaching seminar at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

For the past few months, Theresa Yugar, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, has immersed eight of her students, mostly Latinas, ages 16 and 17, in almost every aspect of the Holocaust. They have interviewed survivors, visited museums, read historical accounts and, all along, have kept detailed journals of their feelings.

Marjan Keypour, an ADL associate director, has helped organize the meetings with the survivors and plans to create a book based on the students’ journals.

Yugar has not shied away from discussing the role of church leaders during the Holocaust, although some students say it has prompted them to question their faith in the church.

“I’m really confused at this moment,” Monique Espinoza, 17, said after recently hearing a Holocaust survivor criticize Catholic leaders for being silent about the Nazi atrocities.

But most of the students say the lessons have helped them appreciate the church for trying to reconcile with its past.

“I’m glad that the Catholic church looks human,” said Elizabeth Martinez, 17. “It has made mistakes and is trying to make good.”

The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which stretches from Santa Barbara to Pomona, does not mandate how Catholic schools teach about the Holocaust. Archdiocese leaders hope the lessons of the Sacred Heart students can provide a model curriculum for all teachers.

Rina Ngo, the archdiocese curriculum director, acknowledges that the lessons won’t be easy, particularly when teachers must discuss the church’s role in the Holocaust.

“Some of these issues don’t have black and white answers,” she said. “They are not simple.”

For decades, the most difficult issue for the church has been the public silence of Pius XII, who was pope when the Nazis embarked on the extermination of Europe’s Jews.

Pope John Paul II has drawn complaints from Jewish leaders for defending Pius XII, who is being considered for sainthood by the church.

Those leaders, however, point out that there were many examples of Catholics in Europe who risked their own lives during the Holocaust to hide Jews from the Nazis.

Yugar said she hopes the final curriculum will allow students to come to their own conclusions about the Holocaust and the role of the Catholic church.

“I want them to think for themselves,” she said.

Indeed, the Holocaust raises the kinds of soul-searching questions that religious leaders and theologians have grappled with for years.

Academics and historians say there is no easy way to study the topic without raising questions about the silence of the Catholic church and all Christian leaders in Europe at the time of the Holocaust.

“I don’t know how they are going to handle it,” said John P. Crossley Jr., director of USC’s School of Religion. “We’ve all thought about it, those of us who teach about the history of the church. It’s not easy.”

It may be even more difficult to discuss such topics with young students--like those at Sacred Heart High School--whose faith is still evolving.

Beyond religion, Lehrer, of the ADL, said youngsters may learn perseverance and determination by hearing the stories of Holocaust survivors.

“We focus on survivors not to highlight the victimization but to help inspire kids that even the most adverse circumstances can be overcome,” he said.

The students at Sacred Heart have become so absorbed in the topic that they have formed a club, called Students Helping History Survive, forming the same acronym as Sacred Heart High School.

The students traveled to the ADL offices in Los Angeles in December to talk with Bruk, a native Pole who survived imprisonment in several concentration camps and a death march that killed thousands of others.

The students listened intently, scribbled notes in their journals and often made pained expressions as Bruk recounted being arrested at age 13 along with her mother in their hometown of Bialystok, which the Nazis transformed into a Jewish ghetto in 1941.

“Every day they were dragging Jews into the streets, cutting their beards and their hair and beating them,” she told the students.

She recounted that when the ghetto was to be liquidated, she hid beneath a bed from an SS soldier and saw her frightened face reflected in his shoes. She feared that her pounding heart would reveal her. “I thought, how can you stop your heart from beating?” she said.

Her family eventually was discovered and shipped from one concentration camp to another, finally ending up in a satellite camp of Ravensbruck in northern Germany, where they were liberated by the Russian army.

Xochitl Garcia, 16, asked: “At any time did you ever doubt your faith?”

No, said Bruk, adding that she never considered renouncing her faith in hopes of saving her life.

“I am who I am,” she said. “I was born this way and I will die this way.”

Bruk told the students that she is not bitter and does not resent the Catholic church for not speaking out about the Holocaust.

“I don’t hate, because when you hate, you poison your mind and your body,” she told the students. “You have to free yourself.”

By the end of the session, Bruk had become a hero to several students, some of whom hugged and kissed her as they left.

“You are an extraordinary person because it seems the war made you wiser,” Crystal Vasquez, 16, told Bruk. “I just admire you so much.”

Later, one of the students, Laura Greene, 16, made the following entry in her journal: “As Selene told her story, I swallowed every tear. I could not help but place myself in her shoes and begin to imagine what she had been through.”

Fred Diament, who survived two concentration camps and a death march out of Auschwitz, was supposed to meet Yugar’s eight students at Sacred Heart after classes on a recent Friday afternoon.

Instead, 45 students from throughout the school voluntarily showed up to hear him speak in a classroom adorned with crucifixes and photos of Pope John Paul II.

A Survivor Recounts the Killing Machine

A retired clothing manufacturer, Diament choked back tears when he recounted the countless number of children and infants who were killed during the Holocaust.

He told the students that when he was 15 and living in the Ruhr Valley of western Germany, he, his brother and father were rounded up and sent to a concentration camp near Berlin where he was forced to load emaciated corpses into a truck for disposal.

They were later transferred to Auschwitz, where Diament’s father was beaten to death by prison guards and his brother was hanged for being part of the camp’s underground resistance.

He showed the students the five-digit number tattooed on his arm, and recalled seeing guards in Auschwitz kill seven prisoners by bashing them in the head with rifle butts to intimidate the other prisoners.

“To stay alive was an act of resistance,” he said. “But to remain human was an act of greatness.”

As Russian troops closed in on Poland, Auschwitz’s prisoners were forced on a death march to Germany. Diament escaped amid the confusion caused by a Russian air raid.

When a student asked Diament for his thoughts about Pope Pius XII, Diament became animated. Although he said he doesn’t hold any bitterness toward Catholics, he said Pius XII had a moral obligation to speak out against the persecution of Jews.

“The church cannot be neutral when atrocities are happening,” he said.

One student said she was not sure she could have kept her faith in God if she were in Diament’s shoes. Diament said he kept his faith but is not sure how.

“This is the most difficult question for a Jewish person to ask himself,” he said.

After the meeting, Mary Madrid, 16, said she was amazed by the indomitable spirit of the survivors. But mostly, she said, she had gained a new understanding of the Holocaust as a lesson for people of all faiths.

“I had read about the Holocaust before, but I didn’t think it was that serious because it was only one chapter in a book,” she said.

Catholic academics say they welcome such insight, even if it raises painful questions.

Kevin Wildes, a Jesuit theologian and professor at Georgetown University, explained: “You have to teach it with a certain openness and honesty, showing them that no institution is perfect.”