thoughts on the Holocaust

Look up the site below and answer the questions.

1. What symbols (if any) are used in the posters?

2. Are the messages in the posters primarily visual, verbal, or both?

3. Who do you think is the intended audience for the posters?

4. Consider the tabloid by Julius Streicher, "Der Stümer," in which a medieval

illustration depicts ritualistic murder of children, a medieval antisemitic myth.

What irony can you identify?

5. What does the Nazi Government hope the audience will do?

6. Consider the antisemitic cartoon by Seppla (Josef Plank) - an octopus with a

Star of David over its head has its tentacles encompassing the globe. Compare

this imagery with the song - "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." Is

there a correlation?

7. The most effective posters use symbols that are unusual, simple, and direct. Are

these effective posters?

Look up the site of some of David Olere’s drawings and answer the questions on the

slideshow.

Look at the following site and answer the questions below.

1. What messages are found in ‘We will Never Forget – Auschwitz’?

2. What does Alexander Kimel want his readers to remember in ‘I Cannot

Forget’? Why?

3. What may account for Kimel’s faith as expressed in ‘The Creed of the

Holocaust Survivor’? What do you think of this poem?

4. What is Korczak’s message? How is this different from Roman’s thoughts?

5. What makes poetry effective as a memorial to the Holocaust? See especially

‘Monument at Moriah’,‘The Archivist’ and ‘Homeland’?

6. Write the story of ‘Behind the Monastery’ in prose. What makes the poem

effective?

7. How is poetry effective in conveying the experiences of those that have

suffered through the Holocaust?

Which genre studied in English have you found most effective in portraying the

Holocaust?

Questions

In answering these questions, please keep in mind that you eventually need to be

completing two major tasks.

1. What was particularly memorable about this film? What questions did the film

raise but did not answer? Explain at least one way that the film relates to the

world today.

2. Discuss your observations in a group. Was everyone impacted by the same

scenes? The same characters? How do you account for differences?

3. Filmmakers use color, motion, and sound to draw attention to an event or a

Spielberg chose to shoot the film mostly in black and white?

4. How was music used in the scenes you recall most vividly? What ideas or

events did the music underscore?

information more than I needed to proselytize and convert. The information is

so compelling because it wasn’t written by Hollywood authors. It comes out of

the human experience…[but] out of history.” That vision influenced many of

Spielberg’s desire to place the viewer “inside the experiences of Holocaust

survivors and actual victims as close as a movie can.”

6. Motifs are recurring structures or ideas that help develop a text’s main themes.

these are used.

7. Symbols represent abstract ideas or concepts. These may be objects,

characters or colours. Discuss the effectiveness of the following: the girl in the

red coat, Jewish headstones, piles of Jewish items, the gates of Auschwitz, the

ring given to Schindler.

8. Discuss the use of juxtaposition in the film. Give examples.

9. Write a collection of dot-pointed notes covering the following themes:

• the triumph of the human spirit

• the difference one person can make

• the problem of indifference

10. Discuss the following quotations:

(i) Poldek Pfefferberg: It will cost you a lot. Good shirts like this cost money.

(ii) Stern: The Jews themselves receive nothing. Poles you pay wages.

Generally they get a little more…

(iii) Goeth: Is this the face of a rat? Are these the eyes of a rat? ‘Hath not a

Jew eyes?’ I feel for you Helen. No, I don’t think so…. You nearly talked me

into it didn’t you?

(iv) Goeth: Go on, I pardon you.

(v) German Officer: What is it? Is it Bach?

Soldier: No, Mozart.

(vi) Stern: The list is an absolute good. The list is life.

(vii) Hoss: I have a shipment coming in tomorrow. I’ll cut you three hundred

units from it. New ones….

Schindler: Yes. I understand. I want these.

Hoss: You shouldn’t get stuck on names. That’s right. It creates a lot of

paperwork.

(viii) Stern: Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

What other quotes do you think are important?