Teachers learning about Holocaust

PROVO — "The Diary of Anne Frank," possibly the best known first-person literature to come out of World War II and the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jewish people, doesn't tell the whole story of the Nazi European occupation of the 1940s.

Local teachers from around Utah learned recently that other journals, diaries and first-person accounts from that period are available to researchers, particularly in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

English teachers Pat Drussel and Jean McPherron, both from Dixon Middle School, attended a Holocaust tour this past summer, visiting preserved Nazi death camps in Poland and the former Czech Republic. They also visited Jewish synagogues that have been turned into museums and ghettos important to that period. Only some 20,000 Jews remain in Poland, she said, so many of the synagogues haven't functioned for decades.

Drussel received one of 15 teaching fellowships offered nationally from the museum where she spent a week researching the Holocaust. As part of the fellowship she was required to put on an outreach project. So she invited language arts teachers from 125 Utah middle schools to attend the first-time Holocaust seminar at Dixon last week. Teachers from 18 of the state's 40 school districts showed up to hear a lecture by Ronald Smelser, a history professor at the University of Utah, and to view displays of literature about the Holocaust.

"He's a Holocaust guru," Drussel said.

One of the goals of the seminar was to show teachers how to integrate the Holocaust into their lesson plans.

"We need to teach diversity and tolerance and acceptance of all people, regardless of background," she said.

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E-mail: rodger@desnews.com