Lesson Plan

Objective

To facilitate the study of the culture of remembrance of the events of the Second World War in Belarus, Germany, Russia and Poland.

Tasks

-> To present the stages and particular features of the development of the culture of remembrance of the Second World War in different countries;

-> To analyze particular features of the way military history is perceived, and the role played by recollections of the war at different levels (individual and collective memory, the politics of remembrance at state level);

-> To conduct a comparative analysis of the culture of remembrance of the Second World War in the designated countries;

-> To form an understanding of the importance of preserving the memory of the tragic events of the war as an important condition for being a good member of our modern multicultural globalized world.

Working methods

Individual, group, teacher-led.

Study Methods

Free association, conversation, “World Cafe”, brainstorming, oral presentation, comparison, discussion, the game “Backpack”.

Equipment

A projector, a flipchart with paper, marker pens, devices with internet access (if necessary, the participants should bring their own), handouts.

Preliminary preparation

Students should recollect what they learned about the history of the Second World War in the classroom, and what educational material on the topic was contained in their school history textbook.

Lesson timeline

Stage I
Knowledge refresh and objective definition

Stage II   Main Stage
Study of the material

Stage III
Consolidation and analysis

Stage IV
Reflection

Stage I: Knowledge refresh and objective definition

10 minutes

The board / flipchart is divided into four parts, each of which contains the name of one of the countries – Poland, Russia, Germany, Belarus. The teacher invites students to work according to the free association method: students write down in different corners what they know / have heard / first comes to mind about the events of the Second World War in these countries. All answers are acceptable – concepts, names, dates, places of remembrance, authors of books, feelings, etc.

Expected Result

The teacher:
-> Identifies what the students know about the Second World War in their own country and in other European countries.

-> Propose that the resulting “word clouds” be examined and the following questions be discussed:

• Do we know a lot or little about the war in other countries;
• Why are the “word clouds” so similar / different;
• Can we say that each nation had its own war, and that the resulting word clouds can be called “different wars”?

Stage II: Main Stage

Study of the material

Students are randomly divided into three groups. The rest of the main stage of the lesson employs the “World Cafe” method.

60 minutes

“World Cafe” method is a method of focused informal discussion of problematic questions which have more than one answer and on which people hold a range of opinions (there is more about the method in Annex 1). The main principle of “World Cafe” is no criticism: anyone can express any opinion. Opinions should all be recorded on the flipchart. This will help develop a broader view of the problem and its consideration from different perspectives.

The teacher should introduce the students to the content of the materials on the three tables:

Table 1

Memorialization of events of the Second World War

Photos of monuments from four countries are presented (Annex 2):

• The monument to the victims of the war in Bad Nauheim, Germany;
• The monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East in Warsaw, Poland;
• The monument ‘Unconquered’ in the burnt village of Khatyn, Belarus;
• The monument ‘The Motherland Calls’ in Volgograd, Russia.

The students’ task is to identify:

-> What is depicted, and the events to which the monument is dedicated; the country in which the monument stands;
-> What is communicated by the monument (what meaning did the authors invest in it/ what message does a person receive when looking at it);
-> What influenced the choice of the site where the monument stands;
-> What remembrance of the war is conveyed by the monument / country, and what does this tell us about that country’s society?

Table 2

Memory layers

There are four cards on the table: three contain examples of individual, collective and state memory in different countries, and the fourth is empty, for students to fill out with materials concerning their own country.

The students’ task is to complete a card with descriptions of the layers of memory in their country. They should use specific examples similar to those on the cards of the three other countries. They can give quotes, examples of actions and commemorative events, initiatives (both well-known and little-known), etc.

Cards are to be completed using the following content:

What memories of the Second World War are there in your:

• Family (example of a real story or a collective image);
• Town or region (example of community memory);
• Country (government policy).

Materials for the card about Belarus

а Memories of a child of war. Viktor Tsybulko was born in 1935 in the town of Borisov, in the Minsk region

The town was occupied. The people in the town were mostly women, old people, and children. The occupying forces made them work, and then began to take the young to work in Germany. We did not always have anything to eat, and there was not enough firewood to burn on the stove in order to heat the house. It was hard, and frightening, and no one knew where our army was, or when and how the war would end. My father died at the front in 1941, and my older brother, who was 15 years old, went underground and returned only at the end of the war. My mother and sister and I spent three years in the occupied city of Borisov. We were frightened and hungry. In my life I have never known anything as terrible as war.

b Minsk: a Hero City

The capital of Belarus was awarded the title “Hero City” in recognition of its people’s struggle and its deployment of an active partisan movement in the fight against the Nazi occupiers. More than 130 streets are named after war heroes (Vera Khoruzhaya, Iosif Belsky, Vasily Kozlov, Vladimir Lobanok, Roman Machulsky, Fyodor Surganov, Marat Kazei, Vasily Korzh, Vasily Talash, Isay Kazinets, etc.). Most of these are Belarusian partisans. Monuments have been erected in their honor in various parts of the city. Belarus itself was nicknamed “the partisan country”.

c Victory Parade

On May 9, a Victory Parade is held in the capital of Belarus. This is a march-past by the army, the Honor Guard Company, and various units of the country’s security forces, and a demonstration of military equipment, etc. War veterans, schoolchildren and students, and representatives of public organizations are invited to the parade. The parade is received personally by the President of Belarus.

Materials for the card about Russia

A Memories of a child of war. Inessa Endaltseva was born in 1937, Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Ural

Life was hard. Our food was pretty bad: most often we ate oilcake, something we called “mess”, which was flour boiled in water, and potatoes ... Our sister was very plump, very sociable. When she was running around the yard, the soldiers never ignored her. She was given treats all the time. Someone made a kind of apron with a pocket for her, and when she came in she always had something with her: sweets, chocolates, some kind of bread. That is, she brought us something extra to eat ...

It was terrible to lose your coupons ... Thieves broke into our place once. We lived on the fourth floor. The way they burgled the apartments was frightening. We lived in a full-sized military house. Mum barred the door with a birch trunk (from wall to door). Then one night my mother woke up, and woke me up too, and said: “Here, Innochka, they’re trying to get into our apartment, come on, we’ll sit here.” They were already opening the door, but we were sitting on the log and pushing against the door so that the log would remain in place.

When anyone had to be buried, everyone gathered, consoled, helped.

b St. Petersburg – Leningrad

The library of the European University has created a virtual exhibition of books “Preserving the memory of the siege of Leningrad”: https://eusp.org/news/pamyat-o-blokade

Book titles tell us a lot about memory:

• Blockade. The Tragedy of Leningrad. St Petersburg State University of Technology and Design. Authors and compilers S. B. Borzenko, A. O. Kozhemyakin. St Petersburg, Rekonstruktsiya, 2014. 227 pp.
• Упрямый город. Блокада, 1941-1944. The Unyielding City. Blockade, 1941-1944 [photo album]. Auth. foreword V. Nikitin. St Petersburg, Limbus Press, 2019. 271 pp.
• Drawings by children of Leningrad during the blockade, from the collection belonging Victory Parade, Minsk, Belarus. Photo: Live broadcast of the ONT Channel. Available: Belnovosti Materials for the card about Russia 7 Remembrance and Memorialization of World War II in Different Countries Lesson 90 min to the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg. Indexed album. State Museum of the History of St Petersburg. Editorial board A.N. Kolyakin, Y.B. Demidenko, E.B. Tratsevskaya. St Petersburg, 2016. 318 pp.
• Images of remembrance. Monuments in memory of the defenders of Leningrad and the victims of the blockade. For the 100th anniversary of the birth of M. A. Dudin. Indexed album. State Memorial Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, and others. St Petersburg, Evropeysky Dom, 2016. 89 pp.

c The “Immortal regiment”. Initially a non-state initiative. Supported by the state

The principal mission of the “Immortal Regiment” is to preserve in every family the personal memory of the generation who experienced the Great Patriotic War (the name used in Russia and the former USSR for the Second World War). Participants in the “Immortal Regiment” remember and honor their relatives, who might have been soldiers or sailors, or partisans, or underground workers, or resistance fighters, home front workers, prisoners in concentration camps, victims of the Blockade, or children during the war. Each participant in the “Immortal Regiment” remembers and honors his or her relatives by going out onto the streets on May 9 with his or her photograph (or with their name if no photograph exists) in order to take part in the parade of the “Immortal Regiment”. People also honor the memory of the war generation independently, by taking a banner with a portrait, name, or a photograph to the Eternal Flame, which is another memorial site. Participation in the “Immortal Regiment” is strictly voluntary.

Materials for the card about Germany

а The story of a participant in the war. Marion Baruch, born in 1919, Hamburg.

Marion was born into the family of Georg Baruch, a prominent Jewish merchant from Hamburg. She successfully completed her secondary school education, played the piano, drew, and was an active member of the cultural union. She qualified as a pattern designer. In 1937, Marion started work as an advertising artist, but in 1938 she was dismissed because she was Jewish.

The outbreak of the Second World War prevented Marion from emigrating to England. She could have left earlier, but could not bring herself to leave her father. Georg Baruch spent six weeks in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and left there with severely frostbitten hands. On November 8, 1941, father and daughter were deported to Minsk. According to some reports, Marion also worked as an artist in the ghetto, for example, she painted signs.

What happened to Marion later is known from a letter from Heinz Rosenberg, a survivor of the Minsk ghetto. “In June 1942, the personnel in the commandant’s office changed, and Haupscharführer Rübe, an extremely cruel man, took up a post there. One day he saw a beautiful sign and asked who had made it. He ordered Marion to report to the commandant’s office, and after a short conversation, he took her to the cemetery, where he shot her.”

b “Stumbling stones” in Germany and across Europe.

One of the forms in which memory has been preserved is the creation of “stumbling stones” – the largest decentralized memorial in the world. Engraved concrete blocks measuring 9.6 x 9.6 cm have been set up on roads in more than 20 European countries. The sites where they are laid are not random: “stumbling stones” are placed near the house where an innocent victim of the National Socialist regime used to live. On a brass plaque covering each “stumbling stone” are inscribed the victim’s name and date of birth, and below that, the date they were deported and the place where they died. The purpose of the stones can be guessed from their name: a person walking down the street, seeing an unusual stone on the road, will stop and read the name engraved on it, thereby preserving the memory of one particular person who died as a result of National Socialist crimes. For example, below are the “stumbling stones” at a house on the Rhine embankment in Düsseldorf.

c Speech by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany Richard von Weizsäcker on May 8, 1985 in the Bundestag.

“Many nations are today commemorating the date on which the Second World War ended in Europe. Every nation is doing so with different feelings, depending on its experience in the war [...]. We Germans are commemorating that date amongst ourselves, as indeed we should. In this, we must find our own way. We are not assisted in this task if we or others spare our feelings. We need to look truth straight in the eye—and we have the strength to do so—without embellishment and without distortion.

“For us, 8 May is above all a date to remember what people were forced to suffer. It is also a date to reflect on the course taken by our history. The greater honesty we show in commemorating this day, the freer we are to face the consequences with due responsibility.

“For us Germans, 8 May is not a day of celebration. Those who actually witnessed that day in 1945 think back on highly personal and hence highly different experiences. Some returned home, others lost their homes. Some were liberated, whilst for others it was the start of captivity. Many were simply grateful that the night bombing and fear had passed, and that they had survived. Others felt first and foremost grief at the complete defeat suffered by their country. Some Germans felt bitterness about their shattered illusions, whilst others were grateful for the gift of a new start. [...]. The 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime [...].

“The 8th of May is a day of remembrance. Remembering means recalling an occurrence honestly as it really was, so that it becomes a part of our very beings. This places high demands on our truthfulness. Today we mourn all the victims of the war and of German tyranny. In particular we commemorate the six million Jews who were murdered in German concentration camps. We commemorate all nations who suffered in the war, especially the countless citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland who lost their lives. As Germans, we mourn our own compatriots who perished as soldiers, during air raids at home, in captivity, or during expulsion. We commemorate the Sinti and Romany gypsies, the homosexuals and the mentally ill who were killed, as well as the people who were forced to pay with their lives for their religious or political beliefs. We commemorate the hostages who were executed. We recall the victims of the resistance movements in all the countries occupied by us. As Germans, we pay homage to the victims of the German resistance – among the public, the military, the churches, the workers and trade unions, and the communists. We commemorate those who did not actively resist, but preferred to die instead of violating their consciences. [...].

“The people of Germany are united in desiring a peace that encompasses justice and human rights for all peoples, including our own. Reconciliation that transcends boundaries cannot be provided by a walled Europe but only by a continent that removes the divisive elements from its borders. That is the exhortation given us by the end of the Second World War [...].”

Materials for the card about Poland

a Memories of a child of war. Zdzislaw K., Drohobycz county, Lwow voivodeship

My saddest day was the day when my mama got ill at night. There was no doctor or anyone else, only me. I had to get up and heat some water. But there was no firewood. I ran to the courtyard and found a sliver of wood. I set a fire and boiled some water. Mama had a very piercing pain in her heart. The warm water didn’t help, and I had to go in the night to the hospital in the next settlement.

Next day when mama was in the hospital, I went to get lepyoshki [flat bread] but the Russian women didn’t want to sell me any. They told me that mother wasn’t working so they wouldn’t give us bread. I walked away crying and sat down on the window sill. I was scratching myself because I’d been bitten by lice. I went to the bazaar and had to steal carrots. When mother was walking back from the hospital she fainted on the way because she was very hungry. I was sitting at the window and when I saw her fall I ran to her. I told her everything and she went to the commander, but he said her problems were nothing to do with him.

Later there was a mass in church and the Polish army was with us and the Russians laughed at us for going to mass. I am happy that I’ve already got away from that hell.

From War Through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939-1941, by Irena Grudzinska-Gross and others.

b Memorial plaque in Warsaw

One of the commemorative plaques on the building at Aleja Szucha in Warsaw, designed in 1949 by Karol Tchorek: “A place drenched in the blood of the Poles who died for the freedom of the Homeland”.

The basement of this building was used by the Gestapo between 1939 and 1944 to torture and kill Polish patriots.

There are numerous other plaques of this kind all around Warsaw and in other Polish cities, too.

с Museum of the Second World War, Gdansk

The museum’s display covers the war not just in Poland but from a European perspective (which has prompted many arguments and discussions). For example, there is a special hall devoted to Leningrad.

Table 3

Conflicts of memory

A striking indicator of the transfer / loss of memory is the knowledge / attitude of young people to places of remembrance and their behavior at those sites. Modern examples of some of the actions of young people at memorials in different countries have provoked public discussion not just about memories of the war, but about historical memory in general. There are real memory conflicts that need to be considered and evaluated.

The students’ task:
-> To analyze the behavior of people at memorial sites
-> To determine the reasons for such behavior
-> To give their own evaluation of what is happening
-> To offer options for solving such conflict situations.

Cases for analysis:

1. Germany:
The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the center of Berlin. This has frequently been used by children and young people for selfies, yoga classes and simple entertainment—jumping, running, and posting photos on social networks with humorous captions.

2. Russia:
In 2015, six girls from a dance group in Novorossiysk ‘twerked’ against the backdrop of the Malaya Zemlya memorial dedicated to the city’s hero liberators. After posting the video on the Internet, the group gained wide popularity in its own region and throughout the Russian Federation.

3. Poland and Belarus:
eleven men and women, aged 20 to 27, including Poles and Belarusians, gave a ‘performance’ on the site of the former Nazi camp of Auschwitz. They stripped naked and chained themselves to one another and to the fence, after butchering several sheep with knives. Young people also raised a white flag with a red inscription saying “love” instead of the word “work” on the gates of the concentration camp (original inscription: “Work sets you free”), calling for the condemnation of war in the world.

4. Presentation of the work of the “tables”.

After working at each of the “tables”, the groups return to their original desks, and present in turn the results of the work of all three groups on each topic. It is recommended to highlight 3-5 key ideas on which to focus and let them serve as conclusions.

Stage III: Initial consolidation and analysis of what has been learned

15 minutes

At this stage, students arrive at a definition of the concept “culture of remembrance”.
For this they should fill out a comparison table:

Reflection

5 minutes

Game “Backpack”.

The teacher leads final reflections on the lesson (which has covered the topic “The culture of remembrance in different countries”). The students themselves decide what they will take with them of the knowledge / experience / thoughts / emotions gained in the lesson, what notion(s) they will “throw away” (i.e. what they do not support), based on the results of their work, and what they will leave in the lesson for further reflection.

Material for students

4. Presentation of the work of the “tables”.

Comparison table:

Annex 2