Resistance during the Holocaust Inquiry Design Model
XR Sources:
Compelling Question: During the Holocaust, what did resistance look like? What does it mean to resist?
In this IDM, students examine a range of cases of resistance during the Holocaust through a learning-stations activity. These include Jewish partisan fighting, cultural and spiritual resistance (where the act of creating a sense of normalcy and survival are acts of resistance), and uprisings in concentration camps and ghettos.
As an introduction, the teacher will provide context using the map of resistance created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This map provides an overview and location for the various types of resistance that occurred. While at each station, students will analyze a range of sources, including oral histories and news articles, related to the various resistance movements. In two of the stations, students will be introduced to two short VR experiences.
In the case of Spiritual and Cultural Resistance, students view a recreation of the Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid by using Anne Frank House VR. In the VR scene, students hear excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary and consider how the residents and helpers of the Annex resisted Nazi rule.
At the station on uprisings in concentration camps, students will view the 360-video of Auschwitz Birkenau and listen to a survivor of the Sobibor uprising discuss resistance in the camps. After completing the learning stations, students use the sources to answer the compelling question above. Upon completion of the learning stations, students are tasked with examining the nature of the sources, including how the VR helped shaped their understanding of resistance, and are asked to examine what resistance to anti-Semitism and Nazi rule looks like in the 21st century.
- Compelling Question
- Supporting Questions
- Formative Performance Task
- Featured Sources
- Summative Performance Task
| Compelling Question | |
| During the Holocaust, what did resistance look like? What does it mean to resist? | |
| Standard | National Council for the Social Studies Standards
NCSS Curriculum Standard 2: Time, Continuity, and Change C3 Standards |
| Disciplinary Practice | History |
| Staging the Question | What does it mean to resist something? Students can create a concept map for the term “resistance.” This map should include definition, criteria, historical/modern examples of resistance, what it takes (physical, emotional) to resist, who resists? |
- Where does resistance take place?
- What acts and physical objects did people use to resist Nazi rule?
- What examples/evidence do we have of resistors?
- Who were the resistors and how did they resist?
Teachers can create a scaffold for analyzing the various sources based on SCIM-C (Treating XR as Source Tab). While analyzing the sources, students will modify and add to the concept map of resistance created at the beginning of class. Students can add direct quotes and references to the sources and add any additional criteria for resistance they learn about during the stations activity.
Source 1: Animated Map of Jewish Resistance
CASE 1: Resistance in the Ghetto
Source 2: Vilna Ghetto Manifesto
Source 3: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
CASE 2: Uprisings in Camps
Source 4: 360-Video of Auschwitz
Source 5: Oral Histories of Uprisings in Sobibor
CASE 3: Partisan Fighting
Source 6: Overview of Partisan Fighting
Source 7: Oral History of Partisan Fighting
CASE 4: Spiritual and Cultural Resistance
Source 8: Clandestine Schools
Source 9: Warsaw Archive
Source 10: VR of Anne Frank’s House, produced by the Anne Frank House
ARGUMENT
Discussion: What types of resistance are remembered?
How has your definition of resistance changed? Why is it important to remember resistance?
EXTENSION
Using selected questions from the “Unpacking XR’s Burden of Representation” tab, students could also begin to explore the potential of XR as a source to be unpacked alongside other sources.
Another interesting extension is to discuss how the Holocaust continues to shape our understanding of memory and resistance today. This article captures how some young Israelis are using tattoos to continue to bear witness to the Holocaust as we lose more and more survivors. This itself can be seen as a powerful act of resistance.
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