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Pellissippi State instructor learns from Holocaust Museum
What really got to her was the smell of leather, from the thousands
of shoes. Ordinary shoes. High-heeled shoes. Sturdy working shoes.
Tiny baby shoes. The shoes they wore in the camps. The shoes they
wore to walk to the showers. The shoes they wore to walk to their
deaths.
 For
Tamela Wheeler, an Adult Education instructor at Pellissippi State,
the thousands of shoes she saw in a room at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., proved to be the most memorable part
of an emotional four-day seminar in late January on teaching the
Holocaust.
Approximately 20 adult educators and guests are selected each
year to participate in the workshop, which is sponsored by the
Center for Literacy Studies at the University of Tennessee, the
Tennessee Holocaust Commission and the Tennessee Division of Adult
Education. Participants learn from their museum visit how to incorporate
the lessons of the Holocaust into adult education programs.
Wheeler says the museum attempts to put a human face on the horror
that was the Holocaust. At the beginning of a tour, each visitor
receives an identification card of sorts—the name and brief
biography of a Holocaust victim or prisoner. Wheeler received
the card of a young Polish girl who was in a concentration camp.
“I found out at the end of the tour by looking at the back
of my card that she died at Auschwitz,” she said. “I’ll
share that with my students.”
She also plans to use the popular book “Daniel’s Story”
to describe how people’s lives were changed-from being part
of a family at home one day to being confined to a ghetto or concentration
camp the next.
Wheeler says art plays an important role in how the museum interprets
the Holocaust, from posters to tiles painted by hundreds of children
who have gone through the museum to photographs of Holocaust victims.
For example, visitors see a mural-like image of piles of hair
shorn from the heads of female prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp.
One of the contributors to the mural is a Holocaust survivor who
serves on the museum’s board. She chose a photograph of
her mother’s hair for the exhibit because she lost her mother
and said she didn’t want her mother’s real hair on
display.
“This picture was several feet long, and the stack of hair
shown in it was overwhelming. What a sense of humiliation for
those individuals, particularly the women,” Wheeler said.
Even the design of the museum itself is eye-opening: one gets
the impression of institutional concrete, glass and steel surroundings,
stark and gray, like a concentration camp or ghetto, and the rooms
have no right angles.
The architect of the museum designed the spaces that way, Wheeler
said, “because the Holocaust did not make sense, and he
said the museum should show that.”
One space is shaped like a regular room, but the ceiling extends
up in the shape of a chimney.
“You could see the sky, and there were pictures of individuals
of an entire community covering all the walls, even covering the
walls running up the chimney, to signify that an entire community
was murdered,” she said.
Because of the seminar, she says she is better prepared to use the
history and lessons of the Holocaust as part of her Adult Education
and English as a Second Language (ESL) classes.
“Visiting the museum was the most wonderful experience in
my professional development that I’ve ever had,” said
Wheeler, who also is assistant coordinator of ESL programs at the
Magnolia Avenue Campus. Rosalyn Tillman, assistant dean of the campus,
attended the seminar as well.
Wheeler hopes to infuse her Adult Education and ESL students with
not only the historical significance of the Holocaust but also the
sense of emotion that she experienced at the museum. And she notes
that the lessons of the Holocaust six decades ago have modern-day
versions.
She says she has encountered students in recent years who have
come from similar harrowing circumstances in Kosovo and Bosnia.
She says the current situation in the Darfur region of Sudan shows
that such events can happen again.
Wheeler thinks that many of her students, both those who dropped
out of school and are now seeking their GED and those who are
new to this country, likely missed out on instruction in World
War II and Holocaust history. She says she herself did not receive
much instruction in the Holocaust in either high school or college.
For part of her teaching, Wheeler plans to incorporate the creation
of masks by her students.
“As humans, we wear masks, and so I want the students to
learn about the masks signifying the perpetrators, the victims,
the bystanders and the liberators,” she said.
Wheeler plans to start the instruction in Holocaust history this
month, and she will get her students to design their masks later
in the month. She is to meet with U.S. Holocaust Museum representatives
in Nashville in April to describe how her classes are proceeding,
and she will be working with representatives of the Tennessee Holocaust
Commission in the future.
Wheeler says the seminar experience was powerful, from start to
finish. The guide for her tour group was Jewish, which meant that
she received information from the perspective of someone for whom
the Holocaust holds special meaning. Despite the emotional content
of the words and images, she says everyone should visit the museum.
“The museum was created with such dignity and power. I want
to make sure that my students understand the dangers of indifference
and intolerance,” she said. “Seeing the shoes was
overwhelming. It touched me so much that I won’t ever be
the same.”
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