Click on the links below for Lesson Plans, Project Ideas, and Additional Resources.

Maus- A Memoir of the Holocaust developed by Frieda Miller for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre / Reference the Penguin Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel

Penguin Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel

Links: 

Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre

Unsung Heroes Project

Who were the Unsung Heroes in Henry’s – and all the other Holocaust survivor’s stories?

SPI maintains a copy of the Lowell Milken Unsung Heroes Project Guide in our lending library.

Books / Video

Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto

Irena Sendler was a diminutive Polish social worker who helped spirit more than four hundred children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Using toolboxes, ambulances, and other ingenious measures, Irena Sendler defied the Nazis and risked her own life by saving and then hiding Jewish children. Her secret list of the children s real identities was kept safe, buried in two jars under a tree in war-torn Warsaw. An inspiring story of courage and compassion, this biography includes a list of resources, source notes, and an index.

Beyond the Last Path: A Buchenwald Survivor’s Story / The first-hand account by Eugene Weinstock (Henry’s father), a Hungarian Jew who was imprisoned by the Nazis in World War Two at the Buchenwald concentration /extermination camp in Germany. The book is a simply told, yet profoundly moving account of his arrest and imprisonment at the infamous camp.

Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project

During World War II, Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, organized a rescue network of fellow social workers to save 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. Incredibly, after the war her heroism, like that of many others, was suppressed by communist Poland and remained virtually unknown for 60 years. Unknown, that is, until three high school girls from an economically depressed, rural school district in southeast Kansas stumbled upon a tantalizing reference to Sendler’s rescues, which they fashioned into a history project, a play they called Life in a Jar. Their innocent drama was first seen in Kansas, then the Midwest, then New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and finally Poland, where they elevated Irena Sendler to a national hero, championing her legacy of tolerance and respect for all people. Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project is a Holocaust history and more. It is the inspirational story of Protestant students from Kansas, each carrying her own painful burden, each called in her own complex way to the history of a Catholic woman who knocked on Jewish doors in the Warsaw ghetto and, in Sendler’s own words, “tried to talk the mothers out of their children.” Inspired by Irena Sendler, they are living examples of the power of one person to change the world and models for young people everywhere. * * * * * 60% of the sales of this book are donated to the Irena Sendler/Life in a Jar Foundation. The foundation promotes Irena Sendler’s legacy and encourages educators and students to emulate the project by focusing on unsung heroes in history to teach respect and understanding among all people, regardless of race, religion, or creed.

The Diary of Anne Frank

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has become a classic since its initial publication in 1946. Anne Frank kept a diary for two years while in hiding in Holland during WWII. It records the thoughts and expressions of a young girl living under extraordinary conditions, whose life ended tragically at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15. Recommended for Grades 7 and up.

Maus

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic books about the Holocaust tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).

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