The Council of Europe also helps teachers with their Holocaust Remembrance Day preparations, by making available teaching material for raising pupil awareness of those dark times and exploring the topics of genocide and crimes against humanity, so as to promote prevention, understanding, tolerance, and friendship between nations, races and religions. The aim is to develop and firmly establish the teaching of this subject in Europe. 

 

 

In this HISTOLAB Tutorial, Dr. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Deputy Director of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture advises on how to teach about the devastating history of the Roma Holocaust. To ensure that the stories of Roma during the Second World War are both fully acknowledged and understood in the context of antigypsyism, she presents many valuable resources created by the Institute, museums, the Council of Europe, and many more available materials that firmly place Roma voices at the centre of their own history.  Full list of Resources on the HISTOLAB Hub.

 

The aim of this training resource is to strengthen teachers’ professional competences, adapt the school curriculum to students’ and society’s needs and to contribute to the prevention of violence and Crimes against Humanity, while developing individual accountability. The activities focus on the historical development of human rights, an analysis of “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, the definition of “Crimes against Humanity”, an analysis of “the Roma Statute” and a discussion on Human Rights violation and Crimes against Humanity in the historical context of the Cold War.

 

Marin Constantin, a survivor of the Holocaust, recounts his experiences between 1942 and 1944, when he was forcibly deported to Nazi-occupied Ukraine. He witnessed at first-hand the mass brutality and inhumane treatment of individuals, particularly the Roma people, while he was forced to work the land in exchange for meagre rations. He underlines that human rights abuses are real and relevant, even in the twenty-first century. His ordeal haunted him long after he escaped and returned home.

 

 

 

 

 

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps were liberated on 27 January 1945. Only some 7,000 prisoners were still alive, after more than a million people perished there. The Council of Europe was the moving spirit behind the introduction of a Day of Holocaust Remembrance and Prevention of Crimes against Humanity. 

 

 

This HISTOLAB Tutorial showcases ways in which history educators can integrate gender perspectives into their teaching practice. They offer practical guidance by presenting both suitable methods and resources to use in the classroom. While in the first half, Dr Georgina CHRISTOU (University of Cyprus) showcases materials and teaching practices that allow teachers to meaningfully address women's history, in the second half Gabriella KOMOLY (Zachor Foundation, Hungary) demonstrates ways to teach about the persecution of LGBTQI+ persons under the Nazi regime based on the digital archive iWitness of the USC Shoah Foundation. Full list of Resources on the HISTOLAB Hub.

 


This training module offers ways to investigate the reasons that determine people's actions in different critical historical situations. Comparing our own behaviour with that of historical personalities can help us to better understand why people behave in the way they do. Knowing these decision-making mechanisms, we can influence people’s behaviour to prevent future Crimes against Humanity.

 

On a quiet winter night in 1944, in support of the Third Reich’s programme for exterminating all European Jews, French authorities arrested Ida Grinspan, a young Jewish girl hiding in a neighbour’s home in rural Nazi-occupied France. Of the many lessons she would learn after her arrest and the subsequent eighteen months in Auschwitz, the Holocaust’s most death camp, the first was that “barbarity enters on tiptoes . . . [even] in a hamlet where everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places forgotten by history”. After the war, she teamed up with a French journalist to write a best-selling account of her ordeal and miraculous survival in one of the darkest periods of modern European history.

 

Nathan Spitzer (now Nat Shaffir) was born on December 26, 1936, in Iasi, Romania. His family owned a large farm that supplied dairy products to the Romanian army. One day in November 1942 the Fascist Iron Guard visited the farm, accompanied by a priest who identified the family as Jews. The Spitzers’ farm and all their cattle were confiscated and the family was given four hours to pack their belongings. Allowed to take only one horse and a wagon, they moved into Iasi’s Socola neighbourhood. Nat and his sisters were barred from attending school and their father was sent into forced labour for the Romanian regime. Although Nat’s immediate family survived the Holocaust, most of their extended family, who lived in Hungarian-occupied Transylvania, died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald concentration camps.