Lesson 1

The title for this lesson plan comes from Dr. Anika Walke’s 2025 Callahan Lecture by the same name, in which Dr. Walke discussed the efforts to commemorate the experiences of Jewish people in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.

Dr. Walke’s work contributes to the scholarly movement of “de-centering Auschwitz” in Holocaust Studies by acknowledging and memorializing experiences outside of concentration camps and death camps. This lesson plan encourages students to engage with primary sources that shed light on the lives of Jewish Eastern Europeans during the Nazi regime.

Background Information

This image shows a wooden trapdoor that disguised the entrance to a bunker used by the Kramer, Melman, and Patrontasch families during the German occupation of their native town of Żółkiew (ZHOL-kyev), Poland between 1942 and 1944. The trapdoor, built by Artek Patrontasch, blended seamlessly into the floor of one of the bedrooms of the Melmans’ house and could be opened from the inside using metal handles. It hid a space that was around fifty square meters at its largest, with a ceiling height of less than four feet.

Source Link: Experiencing History, Holocaust Sources in Context: Trap Door to a Hiding Place

Themed Discussion Questions:

Additional context from the Experiencing History website and optional discussion prompts for instructor use are in italics.

1. Material Culture/Survival of Sources

   1. What is this object made of? Wood, metal, flooring–materials that we still use today.
   2. How did this source come to be? What does that tell us about its context? The builder had skill as a woodworker. The builder knew that it was going to be necessary to blend the trapdoor seamlessly with the floor.
   3. Why did it survive? Who might have been involved in that? It was never destroyed. Many people were involved in keeping it a secret. It was later considered important enough to bring to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

2. Daily Life

   1. What might it have been like to have to hide behind this door, like fourteen-year-old Clara Kramer? The hidden families needed to be absolutely silent, and could not stand up. Things like bathing or using a regular toilet or having privacy were not possible .
   2. How did people react to the events they were living through? Clara survived, and went on to write a memoir in which she described the bunker as a grave. Her sister left the bunker to flee a fire in the house and was denounced by neighbors and murdered.
   3. How aware of their historical moment were the people who made and hid behind this door? Is it possible to tell? We can tell that Artek Patrontasch knew that he had to make the trapdoor blend in with the bedroom flooring, so we can guess he thought it likely that the house would be searched. We know these families had hope that they would survive, because they continued to hide without giving up.
   4. What do the objects that we interact with say about our historical moment, and about how we react to it?

3. Presentation in Archives

   1. Photography makes these objects accessible to us. Is it important to make these objects accessible? Why or why not?
   2. How does an archive select which photographs to publish, if the archive’s resources are limited? 
   3. Is it better to present something unusual or something ordinary? How can an archive decide what is “ordinary” or “everyday”?

Further Reading:

Kramer, Clara. Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival. Harper Collins e-books. 2009.

For Instructors:

The same questions (with small modifications) can be applied to the following two primary sources, which are also from Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. These can be used separately, or introduced together in order to introduce students to Jewish perspectives on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.