The second meeting of the project began with Professor Bentivogli sharing a valuable and effective online resource for understanding the Holocaust. It is a timeline covering the years from 1933 to 1945, available at timelineoftheholocaust.org. For each year, the most important events are presented, always accompanied by images and videos. These include not only original footage from the time, but also excerpts from interviews with survivors. For example, we listened to the testimony of Anne Bloch, who recalled the moment when, in 1938, her mother told her that Jewish students had officially been expelled from schools. At the time Anne was almost 12 years old, and the news reached her family through the radio. Among the photographic materials in the timeline, we found particularly disturbing an image of a board game whose aim was to escape and free oneself from Jewish enemies. This helped us understand how deeply rooted prejudice against Jews was, and how this perception of “the other” later influenced the population’s complicit behaviour when the regime implemented its extermination plan.
Next, we read on the interactive board a definition of the Holocaust and a list of common misunderstandings and false beliefs that are often associated with this historical event. First of all, we linked the Shoah to the Nazi intention to eliminate the Jewish population entirely. However, during those same years and through the same methods of persecution, the regime also targeted other groups considered “harmful” to the development of the Aryan race: people with disabilities, homosexuals, political dissidents, members of religious groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavs, Roma and Sinti, and others.
In the final part of the lesson, we divided into groups and were given different images related to the history of the Holocaust. The selection ranged from examples of antisemitism dating back many centuries to the tragic end in the gas chambers, including photographs showing the catastrophic effects of the First World War. Our teachers, Professors Bentivogli and Giada Virgilio, guided us in reading the captions and reflecting on them. Each group then chose a couple of images that we felt were the most representative, most aligned with the idea of the Shoah that we had so far. Some classmates, for instance, selected a basket containing the wedding rings of Jews arriving at an extermination camp; others chose a photograph of a woman walking toward the gas chambers with her children; another group selected one of the death marches and a concentration camp just liberated by the Allies. From this, we realized our tendency to reduce the Holocaust to its final phase — the “Final Solution” — without usually focusing on everything that came before it.
Finally, among the proposed images we tried to identify some that directly disproved one of our “misconceptions.” For example, a short article from a U.S. newspaper in 1942 clearly reported the appeal of a rabbi: a real extermination operation was taking place in Europe. Therefore, it is difficult to claim that nobody knew what fate awaited those who had been torn from their homes and deported.
Sofia Checchi, Giacomo Lambertini – Class 4C