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It just so happened that the summer before Sam told me about his “creepy” experience, I had gone on a
professional development program in Europe sponsored by CENTROPA (www.centropa.org), a historical
institute based in Vienna, Austria. CENTROPA interviewed over 1200 elderly Jews in 15 Central and Eastern
European countries, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Turkey, and Greece. They did not use video or
focus on the Holocaust. Rather, they said to their respondents: show us your old family photographs and tell
us your entire life stories spanning the twentieth century. CENTROPA digitized the photographs, translated
most of the interviews, and began making short, multimedia films about 20 th century Jewish life: how Jews
fell in love, the sports they loved playing, the jobs they took as young adults, how they survived, and how
they rebuilt their lives after the war. While it may seem counterintuitive that an organization that worked more
with old family photographs than video would provide useful teaching resources for 21 st century students,
CENTROPA brought my thinking about teaching the Holocaust into the 21 st century in several ways:
a
b
c
CENTROPA expands Holocaust education to focus more on how Jews lived than how they died,
pulling back the lens from the 1933 to 1945 to include the people, communities, oxford, and
cultures that were lost, what survivors faced when the war was over, and how individuals and
societies rebuilt themselves post-war;
CENTROPA’s web-based, open-sourced materials and short multimedia films encouraged me to
create student-directed projects using technology my students loved and found engaging;
Traveling with CENTROPA to Central Europe enabled me to update my students about how
European countries have rebuilt their societies and, where relevant, dealt with their complicity in
the Holocaust;
115 HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN PEDAGOGY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE
d
Perhaps most exciting, CENTROPA’s international teachers network connected me to European
teachers with whom I could partner to create cross-cultural projects so my students could learn,
for example, what it was like to be a Jewish teen in Berlin, Budapest, or Prague in 2007. In other
words, CENTROPA gave me new ideas, resources, and tools for bringing my teaching of the
Holocaust into the 21 st century.