Author Terry Lee Marzell and her husband, Hal, toured Auschwitz, the most notorious of the World War II Nazi concentration camps, on their tour of Eastern Europe in 2025. Photo credit: Terry Lee Marzell
Many Social Studies teachers, and also some Language Arts teachers, include Holocaust education as part of their classroom curriculum. Last month, my husband Hal and I traveled to Eastern Europe, where we were able to visit Auschwitz, the most notorious of the World War II Nazi concentration camps. This famous historic site is located outside of Krakow, Poland. Here is a brief description of our visit there and some links to some online Holocaust educational materials which teachers can incorporate into their lessons.
The guided tour, which lasted 90 minutes, was as sobering as you might expect. Our guide related a great deal of information, including graphic stories about the arrival of the prisoners, the disposition of their belongings, the medial experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele, the meager food rations, the role of the Kapos, the daily roll calls, and the hospital ward. Our guide also talked about the selections, the executions, and the desperate suicides when some prisoners threw themselves on the barbed wire fences, giving the German guards a good excuse to shoot them. Then our tour leaders showed us the gas chambers and the crematorium. All of it very disturbing, as you can imagine, but important for understanding the depth of the terror prisoners experienced while imprisoned there.
Through the entire tour, haunting passages from Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, replayed in my head. I taught the book for many years in my sophomore classes before my retirement in 2017.
Since escorting a group of students on a field trip to this historic site is not feasible for most teachers, I thought I would share some resources that are available online for teachers to access. To access classroom lessons available online through the official website for Auschwitz click here. Additional resources provided by the Auschwitz are available here. These are aimed at students age 14 and older. Teachers can also consult the website for the United States Holocaust Museum here.
