Late last year, our History teacher, Rebekah Nimmo, was accepted into an intensive and life-changing teaching programme through the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. She tells of her time at Yad Vashem in Israel. 

This trip ran from mid-January to early-February 2017. The teachers hailed from different parts of New Zealand, and this trip was also a great chance to make other professional connections in regions across our country.

I want to give a special thank you to the HCNZ and Yad Vashem, who met our every need and much much more. They breathed life into an emotional, harrowing time in our recent history and did so with such grace and respect.

During our time in Israel, we were based in Jerusalem and traveled to the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Centre most mornings, where we studied various aspects of the Shoah in their International School. Some of the seminar highlights were Holocaust in Film, Holocaust in Literature, workshops with three Holocaust survivors, and a seminar on how to face up to Holocaust denial.

During our weekends, we were taken on day trips to sites of historical importance, such as: the Belvoir Crusader castle, Masada National Park, Capernaum, the Old City and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall tunnels, the Jordanian border, Megiddo National Park, a historical kibbutz, Tel Aviv and Old Jaffa, Independence Hall, and many other places. Each trip held importance to either the Shoah or to a special point in Israel’s history.

The main focus of the trip was to gather the educational knowledge and resources to be able to effectively teach the Shoah back in my Social Studies and History classes. I came back with valuable resources that were only able to be purchased over in Yad Vashem. I also came back with a true passion to tell victims’ stories in a way that respects their experience and to not employ ‘shock and awe’ tactics when teaching. Instead, it is important to take students safely in and safely out of the Holocaust, so they are able to hear the individual voices rather than be overwhelmed with death statistics and the enormity of it all. I am excited to begin to develop resources and to teach what I have learned so far.

Finally, one experience that I will always remember was standing at Oskar Schindler’s grave (of the Schindler’s List film) with Eva Lavi - a young girl during the Shoah who was saved by Schindler along with her mother. We all paid our respects by placing a stone on his grave from home. Then we turned to Eva, who also paid her respects to Mr Schindler.

“He was a human in an inhumane time,” she said.

This essentially is the challenge I hope to convey to my students: how can we stand up for what is right and just, even if the odds are stacked against us?