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April 25, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 8Oakland,
CA
O’Dowd teacher lauded for Holocaust education
When teacher Bonnie Sussman introduced her American History students to
World War II, with all its dramas and horrors, the pupils took it deeply
to heart.
They had urgent questions, the “big questions,” she said,
about this war and, in particular, the events of the Holocaust.
Sussman did her best to come up with the right answers.
The middle school students at Notre Dame des Victoires School in San Francisco
wanted to know: Why Germany? Why a Christian, 20th Century, enlightened
country? Why the Jews? What did the United States do?
“The answers are not simple and take so much time to investigate,”
Sussman said, and as she searched for explanations, she found herself
drawn to a deeper exploration of the era. “It’s a history
that the more you find out about, the more you want to know,” she
said.
It was the beginning of a new turn to her life, and today, Sussman, a
social studies teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland,
offers an elective course in Holocaust studies for juniors and seniors.
Her expertise in the subject has also won her recognition and membership
in the first Regional Education Corps of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
As a corps member, Sussman will present workshops and other events sponsored
by the museum, helping teachers and others learn about the Holocaust.
She is presently compiling information about Holocaust courses in the
West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii.
At the same time she is helping staff at St. Joseph Notre Dame High School
in Alameda create their own course on the Holocaust. Sussman has been
“extremely generous and very, very helpful,” said John Gunty,
religion teacher at St. Joseph Notre Dame, who is preparing the course.
Stephen Feinberg, director of national outreach in the museum’s
education division, also had high praise for Sussman, calling her “one
of the premier teachers of the Holocaust in the United States.”
She was one of 77 to apply for the regional corps and one of 17 to be
selected.
The museum has been training teachers in Holocaust studies, Feinberg said,
and is still “inundated with teacher training demands.”
The regional corps, which includes members in various regions of the U.S.,
was “the next logical step,” he said. Corps members will work
at the regional and national level to educate teachers and the public.
Feinberg met Sussman in 1997 when she was visiting the museum library
in Washington, D.C. She had been teaching the Holocaust course for two
years, and he invited her to apply for a museum fellowship. Sussman became
a Museum Teacher Fellow in the summer of 1998, spending a week at the
museum and later developing a CD of art and music about the Holocaust.
“She was an absolutely outstanding Museum Teacher Fellow,”
Feinberg said. In 2002 she received two awards for her work – the
Bilha Sperling Holocaust Educator Award and the Rene C. Molho Teaching
of the Holocaust Award.
Sussman has taught in Bay Area Catholic schools for 33 years and began
the Holocaust course at Bishop O’Dowd 10 years ago. She opens the
one-semester course with an overview of Jewish life and culture before
the Holocaust, so students can “see normal people engaged in normal
activities and assimilated into society.”
She then takes the class into the roots of anti-Semitism, the rise of
Hitler, and persecution under Nazi rule. The students learn about ghettoes
and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, such as gypsies and Jehovah’s
Witnesses.
“Resistance is a theme that we use,” Sussman said, “so
they know that not everybody willingly walked to their death.” She
also shows the class that some individuals and communities worked to save
the Jews.
Holocaust survivors appear before the class to speak of their experiences,
and the students view clips from the museum website.
“We also read quite a bit of literature,” Sussman said. They
read diaries written by “people who did and didn’t survive,”
among them several children who describe theirlives in hiding. Anne Frank’s
work, however, is not on the reading list.
“There are days that I feel that I’ve been through a wringer,”
Sussman said. “I tell the kids that it’s okay to cry.”
For their final project of the semester, students can take a test on the
material they’ve covered or they can choose to express their reactions
through creative work. They have produced art works, poetry and music,
each work accompanied by a one- or two-page explanation of what it is
meant to convey.
“It’s truly amazing to see how this course has touched them,”
Sussman said.
Gunty at St. Joseph Notre Dame, said students have shown so much interest
in a Holocaust course there that he expects the school will offer two
sections in the fall. It, too, will be an elective for juniors and seniors.
SJND students already learn about the Holocaust in religion, social studies
and English courses, and Gunty wanted to extend these studies. French
teacher Andree Schute, whose family suffered from the Holocaust, was also
eager to bring a course to the high school.
Gunty credits Sussman’s passion for the subject with helping move
the project forward and said he was also inspired by attending a workshop
on the subject last summer in Washington, D.C. It was co-sponsored by
the Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Museum and the D.C. archdiocese.
Sussman has shared her syllabus and other resources with them, Gunty said,
lending her experience and expertise to spread knowledge of the Holocaust.
And Sussman, in turn, says she has benefited from the students and their
reactions.
Her class attracts Jewish as well as non-Jewish students, but for all
of them, she has the same goal. “Part of my hope is that students
will take the lessons of the Holocaust,” she said, “and see
the need to prevent genocide, and that they will be voices for peace and
tolerance.”
Bonnie Sussman
Dana Riley, Class of 2004, painted this representation of the Holocaust as her final project in Sussman's class.
In this painting by Danielle Sachs, Class of 2003, a Holocaust survivor stands in front of a group of victims. A real piece of barbed wire encircles the painting.
Lauren Pressler, Class of 2004, created this pen and ink drawing in memory of her grandfather, who survived the Holocaust. On the back of the drawing she wrote, “The damage done by the Nazis continues to scar the hearts and souls of the descendants of those original victims.”
