The impact was enormous.

Providence Day educators Thamar Lebrón Fernández and Kinga Zay went on a Holocaust travel learning trip in Poland over the summer, and their experience is hard to describe, Ms. Zay says.

“One takeaway is that to teach about the Holocaust, one needs to comprehend that these places mean not just numbers and the collective pain, but these are the places where six million individuals with their own history, dreams, love, and hopes perished,” she says. “That's why the reading of survivor testimonies at these key places anchored our collective experience. Those words spoken and read by my colleagues were the most meaningful way to remember the persecuted Jews of the Holocaust.”

Adds Lebrón Fernández: “One of the things that happens when you teach history is that you are always the outsider looking to the past through documents. This experience forced me to engage with history in a personal way that I'm not used to, making it more challenging.”

Zay, an Upper School World Language teacher, and Lebrón Fernández, an Upper School History teacher, went on the trip as part of the Greenspon Center’s Holocaust Pedagogy Certification Program at Queens University. The pair finished the program in 2023, which provides intensive training on methods and strategies for teaching about the Holocaust across subjects and grades in 6-12 settings.

The program, according to its website, prompts participants to ask questions and think critically about why the Holocaust happened, what it means for learners today, and how they can engage others in our schools and communities to do the same. 

“The takeaway that I am going to use most in my approach to teaching about the Holocaust is the aspect of community,” Ms. Zay says. “To bear witness, to work through the facts but also the emotions, and the trauma of the Holocaust is best done with people whose engagement with the topic is similarly serious and deep as my own.”

Survivor testimonies

Participants in the trip spent five days in Warsaw before moving to Krakow, one of the oldest and largest cities in Poland. They visited sites of concentration and extermination camps.

“Poland would not be truly a destination one would want to visit necessarily if it were not for the tragic history that puts it on the map,” Zay says. 

During the trip, they read survivor testimonies at key places that “anchored their collective experience, they say. 

“Those words spoken and read by my colleagues were the most meaningful way to remember the persecuted Jews of the Holocaust,” Zay says. “Poland feels like a huge cemetery, a memorial to those who were murdered and whose absence is a constant reminder of the Holocaust. However, there is a pressing dilemma of how to respectfully memorialize the victims, how not to forget, and how to make amends.”

Poland, they say, just like the United States is grappling with its painful past and often does not make the mark to honor the memory of the ones who were lost. It is painfully obvious that the task is enormous.

Teaching about the Holocaust

Lebrón Fernández plans on using some of her pictures and documents from the trip to create short answer questions for her AP World History class. She’s also going to have students research individuals in her women’s history course “to make history more personal to students.”

“I didn't take pictures in many places [though] because I felt that it was disrespectful to the memory of those that lost their lives there,” Lebrón Fernández says.

“The certification allows teachers to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust and develop strategies to teach it effectively in the classroom. The biggest takeaway is the need to teach not only facts and figures. Resistance, personal stories, and experiences need to be part of the teaching of the Holocaust.”

Zay agrees and says it was interesting to find a community of colleagues who believe in the importance of teaching the Holocaust passionately and are dedicated to combating hate in their daily work. 

“One cannot stop working through what happened and how it is impacting the present and the future,” Zay says. “History seems to never finish, and our job is to learn not just about it, but through it and from it, regardless of our age or our place in society. A healthy nation should be dealing with its past extensively and promote the process of healing through memorializing in a meaningful way. Healing can only come if we all participate in the work.”

---

Top photo: The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (Pomnik Bohaterów Getta) is located in the square in front of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (POLIN) in Warsaw, Poland. The monument honors the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the martyrs who died in the ghetto.