THE CSA U-BAHN / S-BAHN LINES
You will return home from the Summer Academy with an expanded knowledge base and a wide range of teaching tools, gained through challenging and stimulating workshops, films and tours.
Here's an overview of what you'll be learning and why these topics are important to you and to your students.
The Sephardic line (MANDATORY)
Expelled from Spain in 1492, 200,000 Jews settled in Ottoman lands. By and large, they got along with their neighbors, until WW 2, when most were murdered. Who were the Sephardim? How can you use their stories to bring to life history and moral courage?
The changing identities line (ELECTIVE)
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1. You begin life as a Hasidic Jew. Borders change and your city is now in the USSR. You become an atheist. Communism falls and you turn back to Judaism. 2. You love your country, but you flee twice, first from the Nazis, then the Communists. Changing borders changed identities in the 20th century - to understand how is to understand 20th century European history. The German line (MANDATORY)
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They had risen to dizzying heights. They led the world in science, music, art and industry. 525,000 Jews lived in Germany in 1933; by 1945 there were but a handful left. What had their lives been like before? Where did they flee to? Who came back and what are their lives like now? These are the uneasy questions—and answers-- we will delve into—on film, in person, in eBooks.The Soviet Union line (ELECTIVE)
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Stories worthy of a Russian novel! Haya-Lea Detinko, a Zionist club member, was swept up into Stalin’s Gulag, while her parents were murdered by the Nazis. Arnold Fabrikant was a soldier who fought all the way to Berlin. Our new reader, The Jewish Soldiers’ Red Star, gives you 21 powerful stories of front line Russian Jewish soldiers. |
Poland and the shtetls line (MANDATORY)
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Most of us—no matter where we live or what we teach—do not expose our students to the complexities of Polish Jewish life before its destruction. There was greatness here; it belongs to all of us. This summer, we have films to watch, ideas to discuss, and an active group of Polish high school teachers and museum educators who want to connect with you and your students.Kindertransport line (ELECTIVE)
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This November marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht; one month later, in December 1938, a rescue mission started that brought 10,000 Jewish children to England until September 1939. Two Centropa films and a reader bring your students stories they'll never forget.The Civil Society line (MANDATORY)
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When governments fail, people act. What compels someone to stand up to hate? To say no to authority? To be willing to be ostracized by your peers? We will discuss Eyal Press’ brilliant book Beautiful Souls, and through that prism, we will look at Sarajevo, 1992-1995, when Holocaust survivors worked with their non-Jewish neighbors and created a humanitarian aid agency.The video & digital story telling line (ELECTIVE)
Throughout our network, students are making videos on their towns’ Jewish histories and sharing them with each other. In Berlin, we’re forming a team to make a video of our summer academy. Thanks to our experienced veterans and our printable video making guide you’ll be better equipped to help your students create great video stories.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR THE ELECTIVE LINES
The changing identities line
The following Centropa films deal with changing identities, and during the Summer Academy, you will work with one or more of these films (and the study guides, which you find under each film). As an output, you will create a lesson plan that you will "teach" to the other teachers on the last day of the Summer Academy.
1) MAPS, CENTRAL EUROPE AND HISTORY
How did mosques and Ottoman-built bridges get into South East Europe? Why is it that Austrians brought the glorious architecture to Prague?
This short trip through Europe´s maps explains how borders moved and cultures moved with them.
2) JEWISH SOLDIERS IN THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ARMY
It was one of Europe's greatest and longest lasting empires. By 1914 its emperor had ruled for more than six decades. And under the reign of Franz Joseph I, Jews throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire had come out of the ghetto and into society. His picture adorned their living room walls; prayers for his health were in every siddur (prayer book). And the Empire's Jews hoped that the rising tide of nationalism would be kept at bay. But history had other plans. This film was produced in Vienna by Wolfgang Els and narrated by Morley Safer.
3) KURT BRODMANN - THE STORY OF THE BRODMANN FAMILY
Kurt Brodmann tells the story of his family: how his father Leopold, an actor, fell in love with Franzi Goldstaub, who was sitting in the audience. Franzi came from an orthodox family and her parents would not let her marry an actor.
Because he was so much in love, Leopold gave up his acting career and went into business.
Leopold and Franzi raised two sons. During the war, one son, Harry, fled to England; Kurt emigrated to Palestine, while their parents found refuge in Shanghai. There, Franzi opened a cafe and Leopold became an actor once again. After the war, the family was reunited in Vienna.
4) MAX URI - LOOKING FOR FRIEDA, FINDING FRIEDA
The classic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl.
Max Uri was living the comfortable life of a Viennese Jewish lad when he fell for Frieda Haber. They met at a Jewish summer camp, then ran into each other the following summer on the Adriatic coast.
But the rise of the Nazis got in the way and Max, who had fled to Palestine in 1939, despaired of ever finding Frieda again. Until that day he was walking down a street in Tel Aviv...
5) PIROSKA HAMOS - LIFE ON THE DANUBE
Piroska Hamos was born in Balassagyarmat, a small town in North-Eastern Hungary in 1912, to the family of Armin Schultz, a gentleman's tailor. Her mother Jozefin died very young. Piroska had one sister, Etel, born in 1912. When their father remarried, they moved to Budapest, where Piroska went to school. She started at a commercial high school but dropped out after two years when she married her second-cousin, Imre Hahn.
Imre, born in 1899 in Budapest, worked as a clerk at the Hungarian Royal River and Sea Shipping Stock Company. Imre had a row boat.
Piroska and Imre converted in 1934 because Imre worked for a state company which did not like employing Jews. However, they were still treated as Jews when the anti-Jewish laws were introduced in Hungary. Imre was taken to forced labor and died in Balf little before their liberation. Piroska and her sister were deported to Ravensbrück (both survived). Piroska's daughters were in the Budapest ghetto with Piroska's sister-law, Klari. Piroska never remarried and raised her two daughters alone. After the war she worked in the ministry of health. She died at the age of 93 in 2005.
6) KATARINA LOEFFLEROVA - THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOOD VACATION
Katarina's story shows us what middle-class life looked like in interwar Czechoslovakia with a fascinating collection of snapshots taken in sports clubs and Jewish day schools, skiing in the Tatra mountains, swimming in Lake Balaton and water skiing on the coast of Dalmatia.
A woman of great energy and a strong, optimistic nature, Katarina only mentions the dark days of the Holocaust briefly, when she was the only one from her family to return alive. Katarina remarried after the war, gave birth to a daughter and granddaughter, and remained ever active in the Bratislava community until her death in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.
7) DAGMAR LIEBLOVA - FROM BOHEMIA TO BERGEN-BELSEN... AND BACK AGAIN
Dagmar Lieblova, although in her 80s, is a tireless lecturer at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) Memorial. She meets and conducts classes with Czech, Austrian and German, as well as British and Americans students. Equally at home in three languages, Dr. Lieblova, a sprightly grandmother with a ready smile, shares with these teenagers stories of her own teenage years--when she and her family were uprooted from their comfortable home in a small town near Prague, and sent to Terezin. When Dr. Lieblova tells them, "Things were not so bad in Terezin-- compared to what I went through next," they can only imagine what she's about to tell them.
Working closely with Centropa on this film about her life, Dr. Lieblova shared with us scores of old family pictures. One of her primary motives for making this film was to pay tribute to Fanyka, the family cook, who not only raised Dr. Lieblova, but nursed her back to health after the war, and then went on to raise her children, too.
8) JINDRICH LION - MY ESCAPE FROM PRAGUE
Jindrich Lion, a noted journalist and author, takes us through his remarkable life--from interwar Czechoslovakia to Palestine, then back home to begin again--only to leave when the Soviets invaded his country in 1968.
Mr Lion shares with us his photo album, made in 1938 when he was sixteen years old-- a teenage witness to a history.
9) LASZLO NUSSBAUM - EUROPE WITHOUT BORDERS
A remarkable story of changing borders and stubborn optimism. Heinrich Nussbaum lived in the Austo-Hungarian Empire and had four sons who fought in the First World War. The empire collapsed and Europe was divided, but Heinrich didn't believe in borders and sent his sons to universities all over Europe: Sandor studied economics in Prague, Joseph became a doctor in Berlin, Laszlo received his degree in philosophy in Paris and Jeno, Laszlo's father, studied mathematics in Florence.
When war came, Sandor was killed in a Hungarian forced labor brigade, Laszlo was hidden by a familiy in Paris, Jeno was murdered in Buchenwald and Joseph, the doctor, fled to America, joined the US Army and entered Germany as a medic.
Our story belongs to Jeno's son Laszlo, who tells us that he lost his grandfather's optimism in the Buchenwald concentration camp and that it took until the Romanian revolution of 1989 to get it back.
10) ERNEST GALPERT - GROWING UP RELIGIOUS
In the traditional Ladino language of her Sephardic Jewish ancestors, Güler Orgun tells us how her family found a new home in the Ottoman Empire after being expelled from Spain in the late 15th century.
We learn why her parents converted to Islam, and how Güler herself later came to find her Jewish roots again - before she married a Muslim man.
The Soviet Union line
The following Centropa films deal with Jewish stories from the Former Soviet Union (FSU). During the Summer Academy, you will work with one or more of these films (and the study guides, which you find under each film). As an output, you will create a lesson plan that you will "teach" to the other teachers on the last day of the Summer Academy.
1) ARNOLD FABRIKANT - JEWISH SOLDIER'S RED STAR
A story of a Soviet Jewish soldier from the Ukrainian city of Odessa.
Arnold Fabrikant introduces us to his parents, who were both doctors. When war came, Arnold's father served as surgeon in Kiev, and rather than be taken prisoner by the Germans, shot himself. While Arnold's mother fled to Central Asia during the war, Arnold served in an artillery unit and fought all the way to the center of Berlin.
At war's end, Arnold went looking for his girlfriend Natasha. When they married, they were so poor Arnold had only his army uniform; Nathasha's shoe soles were made of wood.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arnold became an active member in the Front Line Veteran's Committee, where elderly Jewish veterans meet each month and talk of the times when these Jews fought the Nazis-- and won.
2) HAYA-LEA DETINKO - SURVIVING STALIN'S GULAG
Haya-Lea was born in 1920 in Rovno, which then belonged to Poland. She grew up in a traditional Jewish family, joined a Zionist youth club called Hashomer Hatzair and looked forward to emigrating to Palestine, just like her sister. But the Soviets took eastern Poland in September 1939 and Haya-Lea's membership in Hashomer Hatzair earned her a ten year sentence of hard labor in Siberia. The rest of her family remained behind, not knowing that the Nazis would overrun the town soon after Haya-Lea's deportation to the east.
Haya-Lea survived the Gulag and moved to Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where she shared her story with Centropa in 2002.
This film is dedicated to Haya-Lea, who died shortly after the interview.
IN ADDITION: Have a look at our "Soviet Soldiers eBook", a collection of stories from Centropa interviews (soon online).
The Kindertransport line
Participants of this group will watch one or several of these three Centropa films, and learn more about the history of the Kindertransport through the online study guide for each film, as well as through the Centropa Kindertransport reader (soon online). As an output, you will create a lesson plan that you will "teach" to the other teachers on the last day of the Summer Academy.
1) LILLI TAUBER - A SUITCASE FULL OF MEMORIES
Lilli Tauber grew up in a small town in Austria, Wiener Neustadt, where her parents tended the family store. Then came 9 November 1938--the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Her father was arrested, Lilli was thrown out of school, and when her father was released, her parents got Lilli onto a kindertransport to England. From her refuge in Great Britain, Lilli wrote countless letters to her parents. And they wrote to her--not only from Vienna, but from a ghetto they were sent to in Poland. At war's end, Lilli returned to Vienna to look for them. Perhaps they too would return. But the letters Lilli found in a suitcase told a terrible, heartrending story. And then there were the pictures her father had sent back.
2) KITTY AND OTTO SUSCHNY: ONLY A COUPLE OF STREETS AWAY FROM EACH OTHER
Kitty and Otto Suschny both grew up in Vienna, only a couple of streets away from each other, but they never met while growing up. After the Reichspogromnacht in November 1938, both fled Austria for their lives; Kitty went to England, while Otto emigrated to Palestine. After the war, they returned to Vienna, desperate to find out what had happened to their parents. That´s where they met, and they never separated again...
3) KURT BRODMANN - THE STORY OF THE BRODMANN FAMILY
Kurt Brodmann tells the story of his family: how his father Leopold, an actor, fell in love with Franzi Goldstaub, who was sitting in the audience. Franzi came from an orthodox family and her parents would not let her marry an actor.
Because he was so much in love, Leopold gave up his acting career and went into business.
Leopold and Franzi raised two sons. During the war, one son, Harry, fled to England; Kurt emigrated to Palestine, while their parents found refuge in Shanghai. There, Franzi opened a cafe and Leopold became an actor once again. After the war, the family was reunited in Vienna.
IN ADDITION: Have a look at our "Kindertransport eBook", a collection of Centropa interview excerpts. (soon online).
The video & digital story telling line
During the Summer Academy, you will take photos and make videos during our walking tours, museum visits, etc. Then, as an output, you will create a short video (3-4 minutes) about the (Jewish) history of Berlin, which you will show to the other teachers on the last day of the Summer Academy.
Your elective line will be facilitated by a video making expert, and the resources below will also help you to shoot a film. The following Youtube videos created by Nick Holton from the Milken School in Los Angeles discuss the technical aspects of making movies:
Part 1: Saving images
Part 2: Creating an audio narration
Part 3: Windows Movie maker main tutorial
The Centropa Video Making Guide, created by Ed Serotta for last year's Summer Academy, will also be useful for you.
