How do you stand up to hate? As an English teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, I watch many of my students wrestle with this question. For some, their communities have been plagued by persecution and injustice for generations. This summer I attended the Poland Personally Seminar through Classrooms Without Borders, and as a result, I’m reimagining what it means to teach my students language and literature. Our writing and our stories have profound power even in the darkest of times.
Poland Personally profoundly changed my thinking about what resistance looked like during the Holocaust. Before this trip, though I had heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and saw the bravery of the partisan smugglers in the film Defiance, my understanding of the Holocaust was largely shaped by the stories like Oskar Schindler and the Gies family who hid
Anne Frank. These narratives lionized non-Jews who saved their persecuted, powerless Jewish neighbors unable to defend themselves. If I’m honest with myself, for many years I’ve privately wondered why European Jews did not do more to fight back. And for that I am ashamed. This seminar proved just how wrong I’ve been. In almost every town the Nazis invaded, there was a Jewish underground resistance that was courageous, creative, and coordinated.
Though I’ll never forget the scale and scope of suffering in the camps at Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, what resonated the most to me were the stories of ordinary individuals who found a way to channel their pain into protest. We heard the story of Emanuel Ringelblum a Jewish historian who created the Oneg Shabbat, the secret archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. Enveloped by unfathomable suffering, Ringelblum recruited dozens of residents to collect materials that documented life and death in the ghetto to “let the world read and know.” Buried in metal boxes and milk canisters to be discovered after the war, every diary and report was a weapon against evil, every testimony and note a form of resistance; the people refused to be silenced or erased. The Nazis’ “Final Solution” sought to systematically exterminate all European Jews. Yet somehow, against all odds, Jewish men, women, and children achieved the ultimate victory over their oppressors. Many survivors went on to have children who had children who had children. Even those who died during the Holocaust still live on through their writing, poems, photos, art, and stories.
Stories of overcoming have power but only if we tell them. If we hear these stories from the Holocaust and keep them to ourselves, the stories die. The next generation will never know of their existence if I don’t actively choose to remtember. Because of this seminar, I am confident my students will be able to tell these stories and write their own as acts of resistance to counter the hateful rhetoric still prevalent today. I’ll close with the words of a mother in that Warsaw ghetto who died with her children on the train to the Treblinka death camp. Gustawa Jarecka, who wrote to rebel, has a story to tell if we are willing to share it:
“The resettlement continues, it can resume at any moment, its process is unfinished. These notes are motivated by a distinctive yearning to leave a trace, by a sense of despair that sometimes wants to cry out, and by a desire to justify one’s life that goes on in deadly uncertainty. We carry a noose around our necks and when it relaxes a little, we let out a scream.”