The slow and inevitable passing of the survivor generation poses a challenge to the field of Holocaust education. We have relied for decades upon survivors to share their stories, draw attention to the genocide, and inspire empathy and resolve within our communities.

CHGS trains students to embrace their roles as researcher/story-tellers. We see in them the future of Holocaust and genocide education. This demands more than teaching students to analyze historical sources and compose thoughtful papers, read by their professors alone. 

Helping students create new knowledge of the past confers the responsibility to ensure that they can share their wisdom effectively. This means embracing the contemporary technologies upon which the younger generations rely—where they may be found and moved.

The Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. By that point, the Nazis had evacuated most of the inmates—cruelly on so-called “death marches”—along with most of the guards and civilian staff. They had also destroyed much of the camp’s physical infrastructure to mask their crimes.

Main gate of Auschwitz after liberation

 

 

 

 

 

Children at liberation

 

 

 

 

 

The crimes. The Nazis transported more than 1.3 million individuals to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. This included nearly 1.1 million Jewish civilians (or, rather, civilians identified as Jews by the Nazis and their allies), of whom they murdered nearly 1 million. Other inmates included Polish political prisoners, Roma (arrested similarly on racial grounds), Soviet prisoners of war, and still others, including members of what we now identify as the LGBTQ+ community.

Map of major deportations to camps, 1942-1944 (USHMM)

 

 

 

 

Auschwitz from a US spy plane, 1944

 

 

 

 

The crimes. Auschwitz comprised three camps, as well as numerous subcamps. Not only did the Nazis implement at Auschwitz a new method of gassing, utilizing the notorious pesticide Zyklon-B (hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid), but they also used the massive camp system as a source of enslaved labor and theft. The camp produced synthetic rubber for the German Army. 

Zyklon-B canister

The crimes. Inmates whom the Nazis did not murdered upon arrival lived and died on starvation diets. Their overseers tormented them with tortures and humiliations. Doctors conducted brutal experiments on patients, many of them children and Roma, in the name of advancing racial and military sciences. Caged behind electrified barbed wire, the innocent lived moment-to-moment in a world of unpredictable horrors.

Expert Overviews

The Auschwitz Museum

USHMM Encyclopedia

Holocaust Testimonies

USH Shoah: Visual History Archive (over 1,000 videos available with free login)

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (available on the Ramapo network)

Memoirs and Reflections

Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After

Eli Wiesel, Night

Gisella Perl, I was a Doctor in Auschwitz

Halina Birenbaum, Hope is the Last to Die

Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star

Imre Kurtész, Fatelessness

Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz

Rudolf Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz

Tadeusz Borowski, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (fictionalized)

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Witold Pilecki, Witold’s Report from Auschwitz

Zalman Gradowski, From the Heart of Hell

Documentary Films

999: The Forgotten Girls (2024), directed by Heather Dune Macadam

Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State and the “Final Solution” (2005) directed by Laurence Rees and Catherine Tatge

One Day in Auschwitz (2015), directed by Steve Percel and featuring survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon

Shoah (1985), directed by Claude Lanzmann

Recent Narrative Films of Excellence

Son of Saul (2015), directed by Lászlo Nemes

Zone of Interest (2023), directed by Beth Lane

Academic Books

Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History

Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, editors, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp

Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History