LESSON DAY 14:
TITLE:
No News From Auschwitz
SUBJECT:
American Literature and Composition
GRADE:
10th
QCC(s):
2, 29, 30, 41
GENERAL
OBJECTIVES: (IRA/NCTE standards for the English Language Arts)
Students will:
• Students read a
wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of
themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire
new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the
workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and
nonfiction, classic and contemporary works. (No. 1)
• Students read
a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an
understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic)
of human experience. (No. 2)
• Students apply
a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate
texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other
readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their
word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features
(e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
(No. 3)
SPECIFIC
OBJECTIVES: (Georgia’s Quality Core Curriculum)
Students will:
•
Read critically, ask pertinent questions, recognize assumptions and
implications, and evaluate ideas. (Topic: Core Skills – L.A. 9-12 No. 2)
•
Read, discuss, and analyze American literature representing diversity (e.g.,
gender, ethnicity). (Topic: Reading/Literature – L.A.
9-12 No. 29)
•
Write and speak critically about literature. (Topic: Reading/Literature – L.A. 9-12 No. 30)
•
Engage in discussion as both speaker and listener, critically and
constructively interpreting, analyzing, and summarizing ideas. (Topic:
Speaking/Listening – L.A. 9-12 No. 36)
•
Write in narrative, descriptive, persuasive, and expository modes with emphasis
on exposition. (Topic: Writing/Usage/Grammar – L.A.
9-12 No. 41)
PROCEDURES/TEARCHER
NOTES:
Daily Writing
Prompt:[10
minutes]
As
students enter the class each day they will be given a new expository prompt
either in a handout, written on the board or projected by an overhead. Students
will respond to the text by writing a paragraph.
Prompt:
PAVEL
FRIEDMANN
THE
BUTTERFLY
The
last, the very last,
So
richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow
Perhaps
if the sun's tears would sing
against
a white stone ...
Such,
such a yellow
Is
carried lightly 'way up high.
It
went away I'm sure because it wished to
kiss
the world goodbye.
For
seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned
up inside this ghetto
But
I have found my people here.
The
dandelions call to me
And
the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only
I never saw another butterfly.
That
butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies
don't live in here,
In
the ghetto.
The author of this
poem was a teenage Jew in the Terezin (Theresinstadt) Ghetto near Prague in
1942. Along with the adult Jews, approximately 15,000 Jewish children from the
Terezin Ghetto were sent to Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno death camps where they
all perished. Only around 100 children survived the Terezin Ghetto.
Question
the students will answer: Think about
what you have just read. Write an expository paragraph to turn in explaining
your response to the text.
Quick
Write: Students will create a fast response paragraph as quickly as possible.
When the students have finished their fast response, they should put their
pen/pencil down and remain quiet.
Overview of
main lesson: The teacher
will
introduce the students to “No New From Auschwitz.” Students will discuss their
reactions to Rosenthal’s editorial on his visit to Auschwitz concentration camp
in 1958.
Step
1: [5 minutes]
Introduction
– When New York Times’s correspondent visited Auschwitz concentration camp in
1958 there had been virtually no mention of Auschwitz or any other
concentration camp by the media in several years. Think about the Santayana
quote responded to for homework last night. How does it apply to Rosenthal’s
editorial?
Step
2: [30 minutes]
The
teacher will have the students write their response to the piece as they
listen. The teacher will read the piece aloud. At the end of every third
paragraph, the teacher will stop and allow the students to record their
feelings.
At
the end of the reading, the teacher will ask the students to sum up the
feelings they have recorded by answering the question:
If
you has a chance to visit Auschwitz would you go? Why or why not?
Step
3: [30 minutes]
The
teacher will have the students write a poem from the perspective of someone who
was a victim of this concentration camp. She will instruct them by saying,
“When you write your poem think about today’s writing prompt, which was a poem
written in 1942 by a Jewish teenager held in the Terezin (Theresinstadt) Ghetto
near Prague.”
The
teacher will circulate to help students as needed. The teacher will ask for
students who feel comfortable to volunteer to read their poems to the class.
Step
4: [10 minutes]
The
teacher will write the following vocabulary words from the story on the board:
unutterable homage compulsion
encompass wrenches (verb)
She
will ask the students to chose 4 of the
words and for each chosen vocabulary word they write a sentence that shows its
meaning.
CLOSING:
Objective writing reports only the facts; the writer is invisible. In
subjective writing the writer adds his or her opinions, judgements, or
feelings. Was this piece by A. M. Rosenthal objective or subjective? What about
the other works we have read was the writing objective or subjective?
MATERIALS:
Elements of Literature, Fourth
Course, dry eraser markers
SUPPLEMENTARY
MATERIALS: Students will need to have paper, pen/pencil.
EVALUATION:
Discussion:
The in-class discussion will show the level of understanding the students are
reaching.
Classwork:
The poems the students complete and turn in will illustrate what personal
connections they have made with Rosenthal’s editorial and with Friedmann’s
poem. These poems will count towards the students’ Classwork portion of their
grade. The teacher will ask authors of especially good poems if they would feel
comfortable with allowing them to be used as a daily writing prompt.
ACCOMMODATIONS: See accommodation sheet
REFERENCES:
Elements
of Literature, Fourth Course, with Readings in World Literature /
Grade 10. 2000 ed. New York: Holt
Rinehart Winston, 2000.
No
News From Auschwitz
A.M.
Rosenthal
The
most terrible thing of all, somehow, was that at Brzezinka the sun was bright
and warm, the rows of graceful poplars were lovely to look upon, and on the
grass near the gates children played.
It
all seemed frighteningly wrong, as in a nightmare, that at Brzezinka the sun
should ever shine or that there should be light and greenness and the sound of
young laughter. It would be fitting is at Brzezinka the sun never shone and the
grass withered, because this is a place of unutterable terror.
And
yet, every day, from all over the world, people come to Brzezinka, quite
possibly the most grisly tourist center one earth. They come for a variety of
reasons- to see if it could really have been true, to remind themselves not to
forget, to pay homage to the dead by the simple act of looking upon their place
of suffering.
Brzezinka
is a couple miles from the better-known southern Polish town of Oswiecim.
Oswiecim has about twelve thousand inhabitants, is situated about 171 miles
from Warsaw, and lies in a damp, marshy area at the eastern end of the pass
called Moravian Gate. Brzezinka and Oswiecim together formed part of that
minutely organized factory of torture and death that the Nazis called
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz
By
now, fourteen years after the last batch of prisoners was herded naked into the
gas chambers by dogs and guards, the story of Auschwitz has been told a great
many times. Some of the in mates have written of those memories of which sane
men cannot conceive. Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, the superintendent of the
camp, before he was executed wrote of his detailed memoirs of mass
exterminations and the experiments on living bodies. Four Million people died
here, the Poles say.
And
so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion
to write something about is, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling
that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or
written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those
who died here
Brzezinka
and Oswiecim are very quiet places now; the screams can no longer be heard. The
tourist walks silently, quickly at first to get it over with, and then, as his
mind peoples the barracks and the chambers and the dungeons and flogging posts,
he walks draggingly. The guide does not
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/6948/auschwitz.htmlsay
much either, because there is nothing much
for him to say after he has pointed.
For
every visitor, there is one particular bit of horror that he knows he will
never forget. For some it is seeing the rebuilt gas chamber at Oswiecim and
being told that this is the "small one." For others, it is the fact
that at Brzezinka, the ruins of the gas chambers, and the crematoria the
Germans blew up when they retreated, there are daisies growing.
There
are visitors who gaze blankly at the gas chambers and furnaces because their
minds simply cannot encompass them, but stand shivering before the great mounds
of human hair behind the plate glass window or the piles of babies’ shoes or
the brick cells where men sentenced to death by suffocation were walled up.
One
visitor opened his mouth in a silent scream simply at the sight of boxes- great
stretches of three-tiered wooden boxes in the women’s barracks. They were about
six feet wide, about three feet high, and into them from five to ten prisoners
were shoved for the night. The guide walks quickly through the barracks.
Nothing more to see here.
A
brick building where sterilization experiments were carried out on women
prisoners. The guide tries the door- it’s locked. The visitor is grateful that
he does not have to go in, and the flushes with shame.
A
long corridor where rows of faces stare from the walls. Thousands of pictures,
the photographs of prisoners. They are all dead now, the men and women who
stood before the cameras, and they all knew they were to die.
They
all stare blank-faces, but one picture in the middle of a row, seizes the eye
and wrenches the mind. A girl, twenty-two years old, plumply pretty, blonde.
She is smiling gently, as at a sweet, treasured thought. What was the thought
that passed through her young mind and is now her memorial on the wall of the
dead at Auschwitz?
Into
the suffocation dungeons the visitor is taken for a moment and feels himself strangling.
Another visitor goes in, stumbles out and crosses herself. There is no place to
pray at Auschwitz.
The
visitors look pleadingly at each other and say to the guide,
"Enough."
There
is nothing new to report about Auschwitz. It was a sunny day and the trees were
green and at the gates the children played.