Lesson 2

This lesson plan encourages students to read and respond to translated diaries of children who were refugees during the Holocaust. The diaries and their translations have been made available through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Experiencing History website.

Instructors can choose one or more of these diaries to use as the basis for a lecture or class discussion, or can lead students in finding points of comparison and contrast between them. Discussion questions and instructor prompts following three different thematic topics are below.

“ Liesl! But my name’s not Liesl anymore. No, the lovely, carefree time is over.” (Image from Experiencing History, “Diary of Elisabeth Ornstein.”)

Background Information:

Elisabeth Ornstein was eleven years old when she and her brother Georg escaped from their home in Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom and then to the United States. She began to write this diary in 1939, upon her arrival in Britain. Almost every entry is illustrated.

Source Link: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/diary-of-elisabeth-ornstein/collection/jewish-refugees-and-the-holocaust

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 are these objects made of? Paper, pencils, and colored pencils: things we continue to use today.
   2. How did this source come to be? What does that tell us about its context? The author could write, and it was important enough to them that they did it.
   3. Why did they survive? Who was involved in that? Who other than the owner of the journal? Parents, guardians, people involved in the Kindertransport.

2. Daily Life

   1. What kinds of things do people write about in their diaries or journals? Why? What do you write about? Remind students that people don’t always know they are creating an artifact that other people will read in the future. For some people, writing is a way of thinking through things. For others, it helps them remember experiences.
   2. How did these young people react to the events they were living through? What was the most important thing to them? How can you tell? Remind students that the most important thing to someone writing a diary is not necessarily the large-scale historical events that they’re living through. Breakfast might be more important at the moment.
   3. How aware of their historical moment were the authors of these journals? Is it possible to tell? Why or why not? Do you write about the present historical moment? If so, what do you write about? 

3. Presentation in Archives

   1. Accessibility: Translation makes these documents accessible to us. Is it important to translate sources like this? Why or why not?
   2. How does an archive select which segments to publish, if resources are limited? We know from the description that these diaries are longer than the published and translated segments. 
   3. Is it better to present something unusual or something ordinary? How can you tell if something is “ordinary”?

Further Reading: 

Frank, Anne. The Diary of A Young Girl

If students have already read Anne Frank’s diary, it can be used as the starting point for a discussion about reading other journals written by children during the Holocaust.

For Instructors:

The following links are for other diaries of Jewish children who were refugees during the Holocaust. Their experiences and accounts are very different, but the prompts and questions above can also apply to them, if instructors wish to lead a comparative study or discussion.