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.
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Material Culture/Survival of Sources
- What is this object made of? Wood, metal, flooring–materials that we still use today.
- 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.
- 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.
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Daily Life
- 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 .
- 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.
- 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.
- What do the objects that we interact with say about our historical moment, and about how we react to it?
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Presentation in Archives
- Photography makes these objects accessible to us. Is it important to make these objects accessible? Why or why not?
- How does an archive select which photographs to publish, if the archive’s resources are limited?
- 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.
This is a letter written by a Jewish Polish widow, Asna Zhurkovska, to an orphanage in the ghetto in which she lived in 1939. She begged the orphanage to take her children because she believed that the children would be more likely to survive in their care than in hers. The fate of Asna Zhurkovska and her children remains unknown.
Report for the period from July 22 to September 30, 1942
This is a report about the Warsaw ghetto, written by the German-appointed Jewish Council that was in charge of ghetto administration, following the deportation and murder of more than 260,000 Jewish residents of Warsaw. This source may be more suitable for 11th- and 12th-graders than younger students, both because of the complexity of the language and because of the immediate context of suicide and state-ordered mass murder.
These lesson plans are intended to supplement instruction of content on World War II and the Holocaust to meet the West Virginia State Content Standard 2520.4, and were designed as a starting point for high school teachers to encourage their students to study the experiences of Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Providing the necessary context is critical for students to understand the sources highlighted in these lesson plans, and we encourage teachers to draw upon their resources to teach students about the political, social, and economic contexts that provided the backdrop for the human rights violations that occurred during the Holocaust, how and why individuals navigated, supported, and fought against those violations, and more fully understand the complexity of our shared past.
These sources, which are made available for public use by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, can be used to provide insight into the lives of individuals affected by the Holocaust across Europe. The sources aim to reflect the diversity of experience among different (Jewish) populations across the European continent, highlighting the role of age, gender and nationality of individuals, and the location and time of their exposure to Nazi violence. Teachers can use the included questions to start student discussions, and the other resources of the museum to support teacher-developed lectures (including information on emigration, the types and development of ghettos. living conditions and resistance in ghettos, and more). Through asking and discussing the questions provided in the lesson plans, students will gain the experience of engaging with primary sources in the manner of professional historians, and instructors can tailor the themes of the activity according to their preference. More information about all of these primary sources is available on the Experiencing History webpage of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and links to this website are provided in both lesson options.