Different disciplines have applied their approaches to try and understand the transgressive nature of the Holocaust in human history. We have written a lesson plan focusing on a poem written by W.H. Auden, one of England’s leading poets at the time of the Second World War. The poem was written about half a year before the outbreak of the war and as such, it deals more with the problems of refugees than with ghettos and concentration camps. With great prescience, Auden raises the specter of the German-Jewish refugees that had become a factor on the international agenda since the mid-1930’s, and whose fate he addresses even before the war erupts. Read more

Towards the end of World War II, advancing Allied forces from east and west began discovering first-hand the horrendous scope of Nazi atrocities – hundreds of concentration and extermination camps in which prisoners had been abused in every way imaginable. For those Jews still alive in these camps, liberation meant the end of a deadly, repressive, and nominal existence. However, for most prisoners, real celebration was impossible. Too much of their world, their friends, and their loved ones had been destroyed. This ceremony focuses on the complexities of liberation: the shock of the Allied troops at what they saw, and the intermingled joy and deep grief of the rescued survivors. Read more