Wyoming — Author Liza Wiemer challenged Wyoming Junior High School eighth-graders to think about what they would do if they knew something was wrong, or when faced with the need to speak up for what is right.
Wiemer’s 2020 book, “The Assignment,” is a work of fiction based on true events. It’s the story of how two students stand up to say, “This is wrong,” when given an assignment by a favorite teacher requiring them to pretend they are Nazis arguing in favor of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan for the genocide of the Jewish people. The book has won numerous awards and has been optioned for a film, Wiemer said.
She recently presented to Wyoming eighth-graders, sharing from her book and how antisemitism and propaganda still exist. She spoke of free speech versus hate speech, and why it’s important to not be a bystander.
“Free speech doesn’t give you license to be racist or to be hateful. This is breaking down our society, all this hate and this lack of communication,” Wiemer said.
She shared a video of an actor playing a head Nazi arguing with intensely dehumanizing language in favor of the Final Solution.
“Words have power,” she told the students. ”Listen to how he describes Jewish people. Erase the word ‘Jewish’ and put in Black people, put Chinese people, put Muslim people, put any other people and imagine that he’s talking about other people.
“What he says as a Nazi is never OK. The thing that’s most distressing about this is that it’s not the past; this is what people still believe today.”
Wiemer’s visit was part of a unit on the Holocaust led by English teacher Katie Sluiter, who invited her to speak through a connection with the Anti-Defamation League Michigan.
“The themes of what she talks about go through all of the books that we read,” said Sluiter, who completed a dissertation for her doctorate on teaching the Holocaust to English students.
‘Be a Light in the World’
In the back of Sluiter’s classroom, a timeline of people, decrees, laws and events related to the Holocaust stretched across the wall. A few days after Wiemer’s visit, students studied definitions of “systematic,” “state-sponsored,” “persecution” and “ghetto.”
In groups, they answered questions about what proof exists that the Holocaust was state-sponsored and systematic.
“Hitler was the government,” said eighth-grader Lucas Buri. “If Hitler supported it, the government supported it.”
While eighth-grader Marlee Waldrop studied the timeline, she reflected on Wiemer’s presentation and how Jewish children must have felt during the Holocaust.
“They couldn’t really have friends that were other races and they couldn’t talk to other people, so maybe they felt alone,” Marlee said.
Sluiter uses resources from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and from Echoes and Reflections, which provides educational resources and programs for teaching about the Holocaust.
Students read the book Yellowstar, by Jennifer Roy, which is the true story of Roy’s aunt, one of only 12 survivors of the Łódź Ghetto in Poland, and excerpts from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Maus. They wrote reflections on their learning after reading and watching survivors’ testimony.
Sluiter said in studying the Holocaust, she learned that a core tenet of Judaism is to be a light in the world and to try to make the world the best place you can while you are here.
“That’s always been part of my teaching philosophy, and so it really connected me,” she said. “I realized it’s a social justice issue. It all has to do with being an upstander, like Liza’s talking about. It all has to do with not giving your power away, especially if you are a marginalized person. It’s about being able to choose to be kind, to be compassionate.”
Following the presentation, Wiemer said teaching young people to identify lies, propaganda and gaslighting is crucial in preventing more human atrocities and helping them know when to speak out.
“One of the most important things that school districts are doing is providing online literacy courses for students starting in elementary school. How do they know what are reliable sources? How can they determine what is false information?
“We are failing our children if we don’t educate them on how to discern what is right and what is wrong.”
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