Agency in the Holocaust
The purpose of this mini-unit is to combine two sets of competencies—one from the language arts, and the other from social studies—to enrich student ability to identify, analyze, and explain the perspectives of Holocaust survivors who went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Europe. By developing students’ literary and historical skills through reading stories about Jewish resistance, the expectation is that students will build deeper, more lasting, and more adaptive competencies in employing historical empathy across their future humanities coursework. Students will learn to identify how Holocaust survivors’ stories have been brought to life through literature. Students will then conduct targeted research about a survivor’s life, presenting their learning in the form of a visual or graphic narrative representation. This process teaches students to persuasively and creatively illustrate the humanity expressed by those who sought to survive under extreme conditions.
This unit encourages teachers to investigate the relationship between art and history, thereby suggesting that literary techniques and primary sources are vitally interdependent in fostering student ability to meaningfully engage with the past. This mini-unit is designed for students in grades 10–12.
Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:
- identify and recreate both graphic and literary techniques used in contemporary graphic novels.
- reflect on and articulate the significance of these techniques for telling narratives of trauma.
- use this knowledge of technique to describe and assess the degree of agency possessed by Holocaust survivors who went into hiding, as well as survivors’ ability to resist oppression, as expressed through a specific graphic narrative.
- apply this investigative approach to another narrative account of European Jews in hiding.
- create a visual representation illustrating individual agency by using a selection of narrative and/or non-narrative graphic and literary techniques that are identified in the unit.
Guiding Questions
- What are the key graphic and literary techniques employed by Miriam Libicki in her graphic narrative representing David Schaffer’s experiences?
- How did David exercise agency in Miriam Libicki’s account of his testimony?
- How can survivor agency and resistance be presented in Holocaust testimony?
