This past fall, during her new genocide course, High School Social Studies Teacher Emily Schroeder tasked her students with choosing a photograph to hang on her classroom wall.
“They had to find a picture that meant something to them and a picture of a Jewish family or population that was killed during the Holocaust,” explained Schroeder of the ‘Names, Not Numbers’ project she assigned students. “We hear the number ‘Six million victims of the Holocaust,’ but what does that mean? What is six million people? How do you picture that? This project makes it real. We’re not talking about numbers here, we’re talking about real human beings.”
After settling on a meaningful photo, Schroeder’s students used the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s digital archive to find a photo of Holocaust victims that matched the subject matter and composition of the photo they’d selected.
Charlotte D., a senior who took Schroeder’s course earlier this school year, picked a photo of her and a young girl she babysat last summer to go along with a photo of a father seated in a chair, an infant child in his arms.
“It helped people connect and empathize more because it’s like - they’re real people, they're not just the six million number we hear all the time when we talk about the Holocaust,” recalled Charlotte, who said the assignment “really resonated” with her. “It was a really good project - some people cried.”
Schroeder had been thinking about creating a course on genocide since before the coronavirus pandemic.
“Pre-COVID, I had attended three different Holocaust conferences between Rochester and Buffalo, but I wanted to expand past the Holocaust,” said Schroeder, who taught the course for the first time this past fall. “I think that people are familiar with the Holocaust and there's unfortunately so much tragedy that’s happened that we need to open our eyes to and
I thought this course would be a good way to do that.”
For the first half of the 20-week course, Schroeder focused on the Holocaust.
“We looked at what would lead up to something like this, what the actual actions were and then the aftermath, so I break it into those three parts,” she said.
Typically, the road to genocide begins with dehumanization, said Hudson V., a senior who took Schroeder’s course.
“Making a group inferior, making yourself above them was kind of the first step,” said Hudson. “Classify people into a group, then claim they’re below you. That’s how it starts.”
During the Holocaust, that othering manifested in propaganda that portrayed Jews with large noses and other features or traits “that were specifically perceived to be Jewish,” explained Charlotte.
“So it definitely starts with propaganda and sometimes it’s a slow process but sometimes it’s not,” she added. “Most of the time, it’s through years and years of hatred of one group or blaming of one group.”
Charlotte said learning the stages of genocide has made her more aware of how certain groups of people are portrayed or perceived in her day-to-day life.
“I’ll hear something in the news and it’s alienating some group of people and I’m like ‘Oh, that could be a problem. Yikes, that’s step one,’” she said.
Given its subject matter, Charlotte said class discussions were sometimes difficult.
“It was hard to look at the pictures of mass graves and hear stories from people - that was probably the hardest for me,” she said. “There were definitely a few days when I cried in that class. It’s not easy to hear about.”
Hudson said learning about the separation of Jewish families after arriving at concentration camps sticks out among the topics he learned about during the course.
“Just taking them from their families and killing them right there, knowing that’s the last time you saw your brother because he’s in a different line than you and the fact that they burn them right in front of everybody, where people are sleeping and living - that kind of stuck with me,” he said.
During those tougher lessons and difficult discussions, Charlotte and Hudson said it helped to have a small, tight-knit class that lifted each other up and supported each other.
“I think a lot of people in the class did a really good job of keeping everybody - not hyped up, that’s the wrong word - but more lighthearted so that we didn't all get super bummed out every single day,” Charlotte said. “But I do think it was good that it was the end of the day as well because there were some times where we had to be done.”
“We kind of got close to each other which helped us to discuss those things in class,” Hudson added. “We all got along and we all were good friends so it made it easier to talk about those kinds of things.”
For the course’s second 10 weeks, Schroeder assigned students a research project on a genocide of the 20th Century other than the Holocaust.
Hudson was assigned the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The genocide occurred over the course of about three years during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s and resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats at the hands of the Army of Republika Srpska. In addition to killings, the genocide was marked by mass rape, torture and the destruction of culturally significant artifacts and sites.
Ella D., another of Schroeder’s students, researched the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. The genocide was ethnically motived, said Ella, with majority Hutus systematically murdering members of the minority Tutsi group.
As in Bosnia and Herzegovina, perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide engaged in mass rape and other forms of sexual violence against their victims.
“It happened in 100 days and there were 800,000 casualties, though the numbers aren’t really known. It’s disputed,” said Ella. “Just saying 800,000 deaths, you don’t really grasp that.”
Other students in Schroeder’s course studies genocides in Cambodia, Armenia and Darfur.
Schroeder said she wants to continue offering the course in the future and hopes to bring in more speakers - perhaps a scholar of genocide or even a survivor.
“I know we’re kind of getting limited in that but there’s some second generation survivors I’d like to bring in,” she said.
She’d also like to expand the scope of the course to look at atrocities that aren’t considered genocides by the United Nations under its strict definition of the term, such as the Holodomor in modern-day Ukraine in the early 1930s.
“The U.N. refuses to recognize that one because they’re calling it a famine instead of a genocide. They’re denying it was perpetrated by the Soviet government with the purpose of exterminating Ukranians, so I’d like to get into those more sticky areas and the politics behind all that stuff.”
Charlotte, Hudson and Ella said they’d recommend the course to fellow students and feel it’s important for young people to understand what humans are capable of doing to one another.
“I didn’t want to take it in the beginning, I just needed to fill my schedule and then I ended up liking it a lot and learned a lot,” Hudson said. “Being educated enough to talk about it and be respectful to people that experience something like that or know someone who did - I think that’s important.”
Charlotte agreed and pointed out that Germany requires students to go to former Nazi concentration camps and learn about the atrocities committed against Jews.
“They don’t shy away from it and I think that’s really important because it helps prevent it from happening again in the future,” she said. “If you just hide it, you're making it possible that it’s going to happen again, so I think education is really important to preventing things like this in the future.”
Added Ella: “It’s good to understand what’s happened so you don’t miss signs if it starts happening.”
Ultimately, Schroeder’s goal with the course is to create awareness of the circumstances that enable humans to commit such stunning acts of cruelty and violence against one another.
“I’m not trying to push any certain way of thinking about the world,” she said. “It’s more just trying to create an idea that things are happening around us and there's reasons why they're happening and there's things we can do to make the world a better place.”