- Good evening, thank you for joining us.

I'm Rachel Raney, director of national productions here at PBS North Carolina.

My specialty in the public television world is documentary films, and I'm a big fan of Ken Burns' work, including this program, The U.S. and the Holocaust.

But I wanted to say that tonight, I'm here representing our wonderful education department.

This event is one of the many professional development opportunities that we offer at no cost to educators, to families, and community members.

And you can find out more about all of these events and programs at pbsnc, sorry about that, .org/education.

I am so excited to moderate this conversation around Ken Burns' very powerful series that we've just seen some clips of, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and how this material can be leveraged by educators from across North Carolina and beyond.

Before I introduce our panel, I wanna thank WETA or WETA, as we call them, the PBS affiliate in Washington, D.C., for their support of not only the documentary series by Ken Burns, but also tonight's screening and discussion.

And I also wanna thank the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust, which we are about to learn a lot more about.

And as a matter of fact, I'm incredibly honored to be joined this evening by some of the educators from the Council to talk about teaching this material.

I am going to skip reading their impressive bios to you, we will put them in the chat so you can read all about them.

And I think we will even share some of their contact information because you might, after tonight, wanna contact folks directly.

But that way, we can jump right in here, so we have lots of time for conversation and questions from the attendees here tonight.

And just a reminder to please put your questions in the chat so that we can get to as many of them as possible.

So I wanted to start out tonight with Karen.

Good evening, Karen, Karen Klaich is part of the, Klaich, I'm sorry, is part of the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.

Could you tell me a little bit about the Council, which I understand is actually part of the Department of Public Instruction?

- Exactly, thanks, Rachel, for having us tonight.

The North Carolina Council on the Holocaust is a state-sponsored agency, part of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

It began in 1981 and was officially authorized in 1985 by the General Assembly.

It's composed of 24 members, of whom six are Holocaust survivors or first-generation lineal descendants.

And then the other members are volunteers and they are appointed by the governor, the Speaker of the House, and the president pro tempore of the Senate.

And their mission, our mission, is to educate, to, we have commemoration programs.

We are involved in so many different areas of education.

We have traveling exhibits, we take teachers to the museum in Washington, D.C., we have virtual and in-person programs.

So we have had to step up our game, obviously, as everyone did with the pandemic, but we are working really hard to create a network of educators that are connected throughout North Carolina.

- That's wonderful, and I have to say, I was not really even aware of you all until we started working on this program together.

And I have to say, it seems like this incredibly unique or novel thing that we have going on here with the Gizella Abramson Holocaust Education Act, which I understand was passed, you know, sort of recently.

- Yes, last November, yes.

- Can you tell us about that and what is that changing about the work that you do?

- Well, Gizella Abramson was one of the founding survivors of the Council.

Her son Michael is the current chair of the council.

And the Gizella Abramson Act was passed in November of 2020, so yes, we have been working on this and hoping for this over the last several years.

But it was not until kind of all the pieces fell together with support from really everybody, there was a unanimous support with that.

And this mandates Holocaust education in grades 6 through 12 in English and social studies and then other subjects as it is allowed, we could put something in music, you could put something in art, biology, something like that, so it can be expanded into other areas.

We have provisions within the act to create a middle and high school elective course that counties may offer, school systems may offer.

And there's also professional development attributed to this, so we, again, using the system, the kind of network system that the council has been developing and is working on expanding across the state, will be able to, hopefully, get to every school system to provide that training, we are hoping that the curriculum will be sent or ready for schools to use next fall.

So not the elective courses, but just the English and social studies components.

But we're really excited, we're really excited as part of the National Holocaust Education Act that was passed, we really, you know, a mandate isn't a one size fits all, it's not a panacea, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't fix everything.

We have to remember that, within our programming, we have to meet teachers and students where they are.

And that could be different for different places, you know, there may be school systems that have had teachers that have been very involved in Holocaust education, however, there are other school systems that don't have that, right, and so we have to figure out the kind of resources they need, if they need content, if they need specific pedagogy, and we wanna make sure that we can help them as where they are in this.

It's a challenge, it's a difficult topic to teach, I know Juanita is gonna speak on this in a little while.

But it's something that is so important, and we wanna make sure that we do it safely, that we do it factually, and that we support educators in this effort.

- It's incredible, I was on your website, you know, this week and just the, I mean, already, even though I know you're still gearing up and getting ready to roll this out all over the state, but already, the number of resources that are there is impressive, and I just got your recent newsletter, which was, you know, really, really robust and full of incredible information and stories, so I can see that you all have been really hard at work.

- We have, we have, we have a great team and we have great educators across the state, and we're so lucky to be able to work with them on this important topic.

- Let me pull Lee Holder in here, hi, Lee, thank you for being with us tonight.

- Thank you.

- Yeah, I understand from our conversations that, you know, you have been teaching this for a long time, over 25 years in high school in Lenoir County and, you know, way before it was mandated.

So I'm just really interested to hear what inspired you to bring this, you know, this topic into your classrooms all those years.

- I'm just very fortunate, I am someone who could pinpoint the moment their life changed, both as a person and as an educator.

It was November 15th, 1995.

I went to a Holocaust workshop in Washington, North Carolina.

And as usual, I got lost on the way there, so I ended up there late and had to sit on the very front row, which, being tall, I hate sitting on the front row.

But within a few hours, a short lady walked out on stage.

It was Gizella Abramson, the very person this Holocaust bill was named after, and she told us her testimony.

And it's hard to describe, but for an hour and a half, I was transfixed by her eyes.

It was like I could see her story in her eyes.

It was just amazing, I'll never be able to fully explain that to anyone.

But that hour and a half changed who I was as an educator.

And at the end of the day, she left us with two thoughts, and both of these I've always remembered.

The first one was, please never ever think the proverb or saying, sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt me, don't think that's true.

She told us how the memory of the pain of her being tortured and beaten has faded, but she still vividly remembers every time someone called her a dirty Jew.

That name calling and bullying have an effect on people, and she told us as educators to stand up and never let that happen in the future.

And she also said, I'm bearing witness to you, this is the second thing she left us with.

And survivors aren't gonna be here forever, and I am a witness to this, but by hearing me, you are now a witness yourself.

And she basically said, tag, you're it, it is time for you to go out and tell this story and to tell the students that will be in your classroom over however many years the dangers of being indifferent to bigotry and hatred and prejudice and racism and antisemitism.

And the next day, the very next day, I called her and asked, could I bring my students to see her?

Which she graciously said yes, and in fact, she told us to give her a few days so she could clean her living room up some.

And it's like, no, no, you know, we'll meet somewhere else.

But for the next 15 years, almost every semester, North Lenoir High School students had the chance to go visit her at her synagogue in Raleigh.

And also within that week, I wrote my school board and asked them for permission to start a Holocaust elective at our school.

And graciously, they said yes, I had an amazingly easy time doing that.

So we had that class as an elective from 1996, and it's still being taught today, I retired in 2020, but the class is still there.

In fact, they had to limit the number of electives, the number of students they would allow to sign up because I had to teach something else.

And that's one thing we are doing as a council, we are gonna put together this elective so that more schools out there, middle and high schools out there, can offer it also.

So Gizella, she changed my life.

And I'm sitting now and, when I retired, I created the Gizella Gross Abramson Resource Center for Holocaust and Civil Rights Education.

And I'm fortunate to be in here right now, so her legacy lives on.

- An incredible story, Lee, thank you for sharing that.

I wanted to, you know, sometimes, when I walk around my, I have three school-aged kids, they all go to the public schools here in Durham County.

And I've seen this term more frequently now when I walk around the schools called upstander.

And I've only recently kind of come to understand what that really even means, I'd kind of had to ask somebody, I think I asked one of my kids.

But I think that you talked about that in one of our previous conversations.

And I think that it might play into, you know, again, your motivation here and your devotion to this work.

- Oh, it does very much, and that's one of the primary reasons that I teach this course.

One of the many reasons is the desire for students to not be bystanders within their own life and their own community, but to be upstanders.

And a lot of that results in, it was 1978, I was a freshman in college, which is a place I don't usually frequent.

But while I was there, I heard some young guys say a very derogatory, racist remark in regards to Martin Luther King, Jr. And within that hardware store, I know there were two families with children that had, I knew they would be very upset by that remark.

And I was just one aisle over from these guys making those remarks and I didn't comment, I didn't reprimand them, I didn't console the family that could have heard it, I was a bystander.

In my own life in Greenville, North Carolina, I was a bystander.

And that has bothered me ever since, the fact I could have easily stood up and said something, and I lost that opportunity to make a difference.

And I don't want any of my students to look back on their lives and feel the same way I do today.

So being an upstander is very, very important to me.

- Thank you for sharing that.

It's not easy to share those stories where we fell short.

I have so many of them.

- Oh, I do too, I just fell very short that day.

- Yeah, yeah.

I wanna go to Juanita Ray here, hi, Juanita, thank you for being with us tonight.

You're also with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.

You know, I have to say, growing up Jewish in West, you know, Tennessee, in the rural south, I kind of felt like the Holocaust was something that only Jewish people knew about.

And I'm talking about when I was a kid.

Because so few of my friends had ever heard of it.

And, you know, and so I just wanted to ask you, you know, your thoughts on, you know, why is this, why are we teaching this to kids all over in North Carolina?

Why do we think of this not just as Jewish history but, you know, beyond that?

- Well, thank you, Rachel, so much.

Just like Karen, I often got the question, why do you do this, are you Jewish, you know, do you have a Jewish background?

No, I don't, I don't have a Jewish background, I don't have a Jewish family.

For me, this is really more of a human story.

You know, when I worked with the museum on my fellowship, I looked at lots of genocides, that was part of my project at the time.

And it really is an overarching human story.

And I think that sometimes, we have to stop and think about this as educators, that the biggest part of this, yes, of course, there are lots of things wrapped up in this history that were targeted at Jews, but this is a human story and this is about individual human beings each and every day who had to make choices.

So if we go back to what Lee talked about, you know, we all have the opportunity to be an upstander or to be a bystander or, unfortunately, to be a perpetrator.

We have those opportunities every day.

You know, when I would teach this to my students, oftentimes, you could tell that they were connected to the material.

And then they would ask me, they were like, but I'm just one small person in Randolph County, North Carolina, what can I do?

And part of the thing I would tell them is, no, you can't necessarily go out and change the world on a global scale, but you can begin every day to make individual choices, you know, where you can decide how you wanna behave, how you wanna change your own classroom, your own community, your own school, your own neighborhoods, your own families.

And you can begin to make those choices, you know, and at least, right, all of us, I think, have situations where we probably didn't say what we should have said.

As teachers, we probably witnessed some of that sometimes too, but I think it's important to get our students to realize this is more about human beings and not just a Jewish story.

- I mean, we also know that, during the Holocaust, Jews weren't the only population that was targeted either.

There were other populations of folks that were also targeted by the Nazis, including- - Yeah, that's correct, that's correct.

Interestingly enough, you know, Lee told you what inspired him to do this work.

I think each of us came to this work with our own moments, our own times, I heard Lee say he can tell you the moment when he changed as a person.

I can't tell you the exact day, but I can tell you the month and the year.

It was November of 2001, and I was at the museum studying just a few months after September 11th, oddly enough.

At the time, I was a drama teacher and had the opportunity to go and study at the museum.

I didn't know a lot about this history and I was intrigued by it, and I remember very specifically on the fourth floor of the museum, there's an exhibit about the T4 program, the euthanasia program.

And when I tell this story to teachers all the time, if you've been into the museum, at that particular exhibit, there's a bench.

And I can remember very clearly, I sat down on that bench.

I don't think I moved for 45 minutes, because I have a son with Down syndrome.

And I remember asking our docent when we were going through the museum, I asked her, how in the world did they get people to give them their children?

You know, because obviously, these children were euthanized because they were handicapped.

And she told me a little bit of that history, and I think I sat there realizing that my own child would've been murdered.

And so even though I wasn't Jewish, I didn't have that history, I didn't have that background, they would've killed my kid, you know, and so it became very, very personal for me.

And so at that moment in time, I know exactly what Lee talked about.

I remember walking out of the museum thinking, I have to do this.

This is something that I have to do, it's not necessarily something that I wanna do at that point in time, but it was definitely something that I had to do, it was just, I guess you could call it a calling, it was something I felt like I needed to do.

And you're right, it wasn't just Jewish victims, I think if you study this history, you'll find there were lots of victims.

Some for political reasons, some because they were considered dangerous, you know, with their thinking, their ideology, some because they were considered deficient as human beings, some for racial reasons, there's lots of reasons why people were targeted.

- Thank you for sharing that.

You know, and I don't wanna minimize that overwhelmingly, Jews were the target of the Nazi regime, but we do know that there were a lot of others, you know, that were included but, you know, this history, the Holocaust just seems just so huge, like how do you even, you know, how do you even kind of contemplate teaching it in a high school class, I mean, there's people who do, you know, devoted their whole professional lives to researching it or writing books or, you know, PhD students, and there's, you know, so many documentary films on the topic.

So I'm curious, how do you kind of maybe, you know, put educators at ease if they begin to think, there's no way I could tackle this topic in a high school class?

- We'll often, Karen and Lee and I hear that in workshops, we hear teachers talk about, they don't have the ability, the background, or enough time to teach this topic.

And it is overwhelming, there's quite a bit to learn, and if you put I guess all of the learning that just the three of us have done, it would be years and years and years of work, and we would never consider ourselves experts.

But what I want educators to know is, you know, in the high school or the middle school, you're not really there to be the expert on the Holocaust, you're not there teaching PhD students.

Really, your job, I think, as the educator in that setting is to help kids understand, to humanize this, I think sometimes, we have to be careful, the numbers can be overwhelming, you know, when you start thinking about millions of people, but we really have to think about humanizing those stories and individualizing that each of those people was a person with a family, with, you know, all the things that could have been.

And we try to reinforce to our teachers that it's not so much that you be the expert with all of the information.

Part of this is you helping your students learn how to make better choices.

You know, how do they make better choices?

And, you know, even sometimes, kids would say to me, sometimes, I wanna do the right thing, but I feel like there's a lot of other people that would come after me if I did, right?

So ways to help them know how to empower themselves, and I think part of what we wanna do on the council is help to empower our teachers so that they can empower students, so that we can make these choices, you know, individually, we might not be able to go out, you know, globally and fix a big problem that's happening in another part of the world.

But I would tell my students all the time, you can make a choice today that makes a difference.

And we want our teachers to understand that, you know, we don't expect you to be the expert who knows every fact, every detail, every piece of this history.

Scholars specialize in areas, right, so they don't even know all of this.

We wanna help them to not feel so overwhelmed.

And our goal is to help them to learn as much as possible and to empower them to do the job that I think we all believe that they want to do with their students.

- I'm getting the overwhelming message that educators across the state aren't alone in this.

They have you all there to support them on this journey and just an incredible wealth of resources.

And I wanna let you all talk a little bit more about that, but before we do, speaking of the power of one human story, I wanted to go to Zohara Boyd.

Good evening, Zohara, thank you so much for being here with us tonight.

- Thank you for having me.

- Zohara is a Holocaust survivor and has spent many years telling her story to lots of different groups.

And I was hoping that you could share a little bit about that here with us this evening, about your own personal story or your family's story of escaping the Nazis and surviving the Holocaust.

- Well, first, I would like to tell you why I teach the Holocaust, why I do this, and why, even after retirement, I speak to schools, to church groups, to anyone who invites not just me, but my speaking partner, Dr. Peter Petschauer, who's the son of an SS officer.

And we speak together, and I think we show how children from two different sides managed to end up at Appalachian State University and very, very good friends.

Holocaust survivors, for a long time, did not want to speak about the Holocaust, did not want to think about the Holocaust, the way people who were in Vietnam don't speak of their experiences.

And one day, I was coming out of my classroom, my safe classroom, where I taught early American literature.

My field of studies is actually colonial America and as far away from my own experiences as I could possibly get, which is why I chose it.

And one of my colleagues was walking by, and for some reason, we did talk about the Holocaust.

And one of my students, one of my very favorite and very bright students, walking by on his way to lunch, said, is that something to eat?

And that was when I realized breaking the silence had to be done.

And that is when I started teaching the Holocaust, first by myself as a literature class.

And I ended up having some of the most gory nightmares I can describe.

And there was a gentleman named Rennie Brantz in the history department whose field of studies was the 12 years of Nazi Germany.

He and I teamed up and team taught a class, and was an interesting thing that happened, he started having the nightmares, although he was the son of a Methodist teacher from Indiana, I believe, and I started sleeping like a baby, I was just able to shift all that off to poor Rennie.

You ask about my story.

I was born in a town called Piotrkov Trybunalski in Poland, not terribly far from Warsaw.

It was the first ghetto that the Nazis established when they invaded Poland and started experimenting with this.

We were about the right size, I guess, not a very big town, not a very small town, a town with a sufficiently large Jewish population and a Jewish area of town where they could herd in more people from surrounding areas.

And they had their trifold plan of, I guess about one third of us was supposed to starve to death, one third was supposed to die of illness, and one third would eventually be so weak and dispirited that it would be so very easy to load us aboard box cars because we had a nice central railroad, and from there to be shipped to Auschwitz, to Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno, the various killing centers.

And our great fortune, first of all, was that my father was a judge before the war and kind of trained in looking at evidence.

And he started to realize that the trains that were supposedly taking people to the far east, to the Russian front, were coming back very quickly.

And nobody was hearing anything from the people who had left on these trains.

And so he decided that he was going to have to take us out of the ghetto, to take as many people, members of his family, as he could.

And there were only three of us that he could save, himself, of course, my mother, my mother's youngest sister, and me.

And my father and my aunt were so blonde and blue-eyed that they looked like short little Scandinavians, actually.

My mother had dark hair, but it was very straight, and she had the wonderful Slavic cheekbones and pale gray eyes.

So all three of them had what was called in Polish dobry wyglad, the good face, that had the possibility of survival.

But the way genetics mix, my mother's dark hair and my father's curls were all over my head.

And you took one look at little baby Zosha and you knew this was oral Jew.

The wise thing for them to do would've been to leave me, which a lot of parents did.

But they took me along, and you take along a three or four-month-old baby and you're planning to go into hiding, this is probably the most unwise thing you can possibly do.

But my father, because of his connections in court, was able to get, and I don't know how, smuggled into us false baptismal certificates, false birth certificates, and based on these and on the way they looked and on my father's ability to profile, I guess, he realized that the one place that the Germans would not be looking for Jews to go is into Warsaw, where people were being exterminated and the uprising had taken place.

And so instead of trying to go into the woods, into some other small village, hiding on a farm, the various stratagems that other people unsuccessfully tried, he just got on a train with us, bold as brass, right into the center of Warsaw.

We had some jewels and money that were sewn into the hem of my mother's winter coat.

And we presented ourselves as a Polish family that had been bombed out.

And we were able to find rooms with Polish women whose husbands had been sent to the front, whose husbands had perhaps been killed by then.

So there was always space, but there was also the danger because these were nice people, they would invite us to go to church with them.

They, you know, tried to make friends with us.

And as soon as my parents, claiming to be lapsed Catholics, refused to do this, and on the rare occasion, when somebody could drag them, they had no idea what to do with the holy water.

A rosary is not a necklace.

And then we would have to move.

And this was called walking on the Aryan side, and walking on the Aryan side meant moving pretty quickly when you had to.

So we moved around from one place to another, and that was how we survived the war.

Eventually, the war ended.

My father got back his position as a judge.

And the Soviets, our liberators, decided that, you know, like what Putin is doing these days, I think this looks good, I think we'll just keep it.

And my father would not go along with the program and was foolish enough to write an editorial that some editor was foolish enough to print.

And we left Warsaw in the, or we left Poland in the middle of the night with one suitcase each and headed for France.

Again, he had been able to close strings at the courthouse and get us, again, forged passports and forged visas.

And we ended up first in Paris, then in Montreal, and finally in Trenton, New Jersey.

- What an incredible journey, I am just hanging on your every word, Zohara, and your father sounds like such a resourceful man.

- He was not only resourceful, he was reckless.

And that is what this kind of enterprise required.

You couldn't say, this is a dangerous step, I can't take it.

And it also required a goodly dose of cold blood, as he had to leave behind, he was the youngest in the family, but he was, for a long time, the sole support of four sisters.

And he had to leave them, their families, his widowed mother, my mother's family, which I don't even know the number, there were brothers and sisters, also some married with children.

None of them survived.

The only survivor on my father's side of the family was the person who brought us to the United States.

His oldest sister, who had had the great good fortune in 1938 to meet a Jewish American tourist, who had set up his home in Evansville, Indiana, and came back to the village to visit his family and to find himself a bride from home.

And they were the ones who brought us to the United States.

- Wow.

Well, thank you for sharing that with us, and I'm sure there's a lot more to it.

- There is, but time is limited.

- I wanted to ask you, Zohara, because you know this and I know when I'm in, you know, my various Jewish communities, you hear this phrase, you know, never again.

And it obviously refers to the Holocaust, but it can also refer to a lot of other things, including, you know, many progressive Jews and the issues that they work on, you know, today and the parallels that we make to what happened then and things that have happened since.

So I'm curious what that means to you as a Holocaust survivor.

- What it means to me as a Holocaust survivor is that never again has a hollow ring to it when you think of places like Srebrenica or what happened in Rwanda, what is happening in a great many other places today.

And if never again is to have any meaning, well, in Judaism, you know, we don't go for large-scale concepts of sin and grace and redemption.

We have a thing called tikkun olam, which means the mending of the universe.

And every morning, when we get up, we are given a choice.

We can take the fabric of the universe and we can tear it a little more, or we can put a few stitches in to try to mend it.

And that, I think, perhaps is the choice that we have to make daily.

Just as Lee talked about, the choice whether or not to speak up when those young men were talking about Martin Luther King and making derogatory comments.

On that day, Lee left the universe torn.

Since then, I think he has mended a very large swatch of it.

And if never again is to have any meaning, it's to pick up those loose threads and see what we can do with them.

One of the things that I always spoke of in my classes was, where do you stand on the kid in this very class, perhaps, who is being bullied, who is being left out, who is being laughed at behind his or her back?

And there always was, and the students, even though these were university classes, would always get a little squirmy and uncomfortable.

And I think maybe that was my way of trying to mend the universe, to get those little squirms and downcast eyes and hope that the next time, they would have a different reaction.

And as to how you teach something so large and so unwieldy as the Holocaust from grades six through grad school, is how you eat an elephant, one bite at a time.

- Thank you for that, Zohara, all of it, including the mending the world part.

You know, on that note, we do have a question from one of the participants here tonight who says, how would an educator of secondary students explain why the Jewish population faced so many atrocities throughout history?

I wanna know this too.

They say that they normally cover eugenics and religious differences, but open to more suggestions, Karen or- - Certainly, the history of antisemitism is a long story, it's called the longest hatred for that reason.

And the elective class that I taught in high school, we started with after the kind of talking about the psychology of hate and how people come to do that.

We had to look at what was before, that history, and that's really, I think, an integral part, I don't know how you can teach the Holocaust without teaching that part of that, even to sixth graders, there's a way of of working that in, I think.

Lee, Juanita, please add too.

- Yeah, I would add, as a world history teacher, and one of the things that I would add to what Karen is saying is that history of antisemitism is a very, very long history.

So as I taught this information, I would teach it, you know, sometimes even as early as the Crusades or before, the medieval period, there's all kinds of times that I would introduce that hatred, that antisemitism, to my students, so that, by the time we made it to World War II, this was not a new idea.

My students realized that this was a really long hatred.

You know, we would talk about, you know, even in the medieval period, the reason why Jews are known as money lenders is because they were forbidden to perform in certain jobs, right?

So, and Lee, I know you did it more from an American history point of view, what would you add to that?

- Well, just going back also to what Karen said, I think she posted a great link to the video on antisemitism from the museum.

And just don't think that the Nazis invented antisemitism, which Juanita was alluding to.

There are examples of antisemitic laws that you can use in your classroom.

You could look at Jim Crow laws here in the South as examples also of this hatred, not against Jews, but against others, and I think you need to include all of that.

And like Karen said, you can't teach the Holocaust without teaching the long hatred of antisemitism.

But there are incredible resources out there for teachers to use.

And we are available, if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, please contact us or contact the Council and we will get you that information.

- A lot of it goes back even to Roman times.

Whenever the Romans conquered a nation, they were really very gracious.

We'll accept your religion if you accept ours.

We'll go to your temples if you'll put one of our statues into it and worship Caesar, and we'll be happy to worship your God as well.

And as God himself said about us, for mine is a stiff-necked people and it would not bend to Roman gods.

And that too contributed to the longest hatred, it goes back way, way beyond crusades and inquisitions.

It's there from the earliest written times.

- And Zohara, from the beginning of monotheism.

Yeah, yeah, the idea that they were the first to believe in one God, and that's really where it began.

It is an ancient history.

- We have another question that kind of builds on this from Ryan that says, you know, one of the things that struck me is this idea that America has failed its promise to immigrants throughout its history.

And of course, this particular program from Ken Burns is looking at what the US did and did not do during the years of the Holocaust through kind of an unvarnished lens and wants to know, how does the panel feel about those thoughts?

And in particular, that sometimes, it might be hard to teach things where America hasn't been at its best.

- As an immigrant, there is one, you know, we came here right in the middle of McCarthyism.

And coming from Poland, I was even getting it from Jewish kids at school, at the Dr. Herzl's Land Hebrew School, little commie and so on.

And the one thing about the United States is it's not a piece of land, it's an idea, it's based on a document.

And we don't always live up to what that document promised or tried to establish.

But one thing about America is almost always, when we've come to the edge of a very, very ugly cliff, we have pulled back.

And I think in some measure, like even during times of slavery, its most ardent proponents I think knew that this was not the right thing.

I think that when Americans have done ugly things, I think even the perpetrators have somewhere at the core, at three o'clock in the morning, known that this was not right.

And that's how we have always managed, I think, to pull back from the cliff, or at least I would like to believe so, and I would like to believe that that tiny core of self-knowledge of our worst angels, the worst angels of our nature, our recognition of that pulls us back from the brink.

- There's an incredible, and Karen introduced me to this handout from the museum called Challenges of Escape, that list all of the process that someone had to go through to leave Germany and all of the roadblocks or processes they had to fill out or paperwork they had to fill out to get into the United States.

And I always use that with my classes, and it started a lot of conversations and was very eye-opening to everyone.

'Cause I would always get the question, well, why didn't the Jews just leave, or why didn't the people being persecuted just leave?

And this answers that question.

And I can't remember who in the film stated this, but it lent to the question that the reality of America doesn't always live up to the ideal of America, which was what Zohara was just talking about.

And that's something we have to face as educators, and immigration is a tough subject because it always will come back to the present.

And that's tough, it's politically charged, and teachers need to be well-versed to handle that.

- Thank you for that, Lee.

And, you know, even today, with immigrants trying to come to the United States, it's not easy, you have to be incredibly resourceful and resilient to come to this country, legally or not legally.

- And one of the things we have to do too is to help teachers, the guidelines that we use from the museum, there are 10 guidelines that we kind of follow in terms of creating good lessons, Holocaust education lessons.

And, you know, one of the things is to avoid simple answers to complex questions, none of this history is simple, none of this is a black and white answer, there's always that in between.

And so if you wanna come out of this history thinking, oh, good, it's all, you know, this was an interesting period to start, I don't think you're ever gonna do that because there's always gonna be that conflict, there's always gonna be that, you know, if this had happened, if that had happened, again, going back to choices, sometimes choiceless choices.

And so it is difficult, but we feel like that we've got great sources, we've got great resources, we are an official partner with the museum in D.C., and so we feel like we've got people that are around that can help.

And especially that's gonna be important once the legislation and the curriculum start, I mean, once it starts next year, so.

- When I was teaching with Rennie Brantz, we always took our students on a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

And then, after they saw the Holocaust Museum, we would take them to the Museum of the Native American.

And there wasn't much we had to say.

I think it got through.

- Well, and the museum itself says the museum is not an answer, it's a question.

And so I think, you know, as a history educator, I think what we really have to help our students do is to ask the right questions.

History's difficult, not just our history, you know, history of other countries is difficult too.

I'm sure it's not easy to sit in Great Britain and talk about the history of the United Kingdom, right?

But it is about teaching, I think, our students to be critical thinkers and to ask the right questions.

And I would even tell my my history students to go back to the documents of our Founding Fathers.

Our goal was to build a more perfect union.

We are not there yet, you know, no country in the world is perfect.

But if we make those individual choices each day to do, like Zohara says, each day, I'm going to try to mend the world just a little bit more, I'm gonna try to make it just a little bit better, then I think that works us more toward that more perfect union we're looking for.

You know, instead of constantly, I think, trying to, I also teach speech and debate and I work with some college students and I'm trying to get them to think about the importance of, it's so important for them to be able to have conversations with each other about difficult topics and to really question one another and look for solutions and not just put ideas in a box, you know, not just put people in this corner or that corner, but to really think about the person also that you're speaking to, it's not just an idea, it's a person that you're listening to.

And it is a difficult history, like you asked us before, it's very difficult to talk about.

But I think if we put our focus on our students and the kinds of citizens that we want them to be and how we would like for them to repair the world and we would like for them to be Americans, it's really teaching them how to ask those questions, I think, and how to dig and look for what might be choices that we could make that would make things better.

That's kind of where I tried to focus my students because yeah, you know, if you study history, you could get bogged down in negativity pretty easily no matter what culture you're studying but, you know, there's always this this idea of how do we get them to choose to be, as I think somebody said before, the better angels.

How do we get them to think about what they're doing?

And my goal even with my college students is to get them to listen to the person, not just the person's idea.

- And to help them find their own voice with this- - Find their voice and recognize that the person that's speaking to them is another human being with their own experience and their own background, who may have a very different point of view than you do, but if they can see each other as human beings rather than as a stereotype or a group they fit into and dehumanize each other, you know, if we can build on that humanity of who they are as people, then I think we can help them get to that place.

I think that's, to me, that's the struggle of America, of constantly trying to be better, to do better, to make better choices.

That's sort of how I see it.

- My husband is a Quaker.

And one of the things that he has taught me, something that he expresses, is, the question is, what is important?

The answer, if you think you've arrived at an absolute, can be dangerous, that the question is what has to be asked continually.

- You know, as we wrap up here this evening, my last question was gonna be, you know, that you're doing all this incredible work, you know, years from now, I think, I can't wait to see what kind of an impact this has on, you know, the students' kind of present and future of learning about this history and the material, but I think that you've just told me what you wanted to do in the world by the things that you've just been talking about.

I didn't know if there was anything that you wanted to add in terms of, I mean, you've all poured so much into this.

What are your hopes and dreams of this as this curriculum begins to flow into schools and into teachers' hands, and what you hope that it'll accomplish?

- I just wanna- - Go ahead, Lee.

- Oh, go ahead, Karen.

- No, no, no, no, go ahead.

- I just wanted to reiterate what everyone has said, is that we are just the tip of the iceberg here, we're, there are just four faces you're seeing right now, but we literally have a small army of people that work alongside us.

I mean, other educators, retired educators, survivors, institutions, second generation, third generation.

We have resources throughout the state, from Murphy to Manteo.

And if a teacher needs assistance, most likely, there's someone in their own county that we can put them in touch with.

So please contact us, we're here for that.

I dream of the day in the near future where this is offered in every high school, middle school in the state, and just, we have teachers and communities collaborating on all sorts of projects, I've learned so much with project-based outcomes from Karen and Juanita and incorporated those in my classroom, imagine this whole state of teachers collaborating on these things together, it's, I have, I'm so optimistic about the future and what we can do with this.

- I just wanna say, I have a eight-year-old granddaughter who is the apple of my eye, and she's in third grade.

And so in three years, she'll be starting middle school.

And I'm just so excited for her to be able to get this education, this curriculum, this part of that, and I look forward to be able to talk with her about it as she grows through this.

And so that gives me hope, it makes me excited, and on the days when it's really frustrating or you get down or you think, oh, is anybody really gonna do this?

You have to keep going and you have to say, this is really important and I want my granddaughter to be able to learn and critically think and make those relationships with people that she may not agree with or who may not like her for whatever reason.

So I feel like I have a personal stake in this in a way.

Juanita.

- Well, I think I said everything I was gonna say.

Yeah, but in, you know, when you ask us like what we think success would look like, obviously, I'm the dreamer of the group.

I'm often told I need somebody to bring my feet back to the ground, so obviously, I would love for us to be able to see eventually this work accomplish the time where never again actually means never again.

I'm with Zohara, I want it to be more than just an empty phrase, you know, that's ideally what I would like to see happen, but more realistically, I'm with Lee, I really wanna be able to see teachers be empowered to do the work that they can do.

You know, it's been, the last few years have been really, really difficult for teachers, and we understand that.

And it is, I think, you know, I work with future teachers, I work with student teachers, and I want educators out there listening to understand that we get it, we've been in the classroom and we get it.

And I understand that, I guess, I don't know if this is the right word, but the magic in the classroom is the teacher.

So if we can empower you and help you and give you whatever we can do to help you feel confident, at least in the ability to begin this work, we can empower you to empower your students.

And for me, that is what I wanna see come out of this work, I want us to be able to help those teachers create what they want in their communities and that critical thinking that they want for their students so that they can, you know, because they know their communities, they know their school system, they know their students better than we do.

Lee talked about resources across the state, you know, students in eastern North Carolina might have different needs than students in western North Carolina.

So we want teachers to be able to, we wanna help them where they are and help them create whatever it is that they need to feel good enough to do this work, so empowerment, I think, is what I see as the ideal.

- You all have really inspired me tonight.

And I'm sorry we're out of time here because I feel like we could keep talking about all of this, whether anyone is watching or not.

I'm not ready to end the conversation, but we do need to here.

I wanna thank all of you all, the wonderful panelists here, for joining us this evening and sharing your work with us.

And again, a special thank you to WETA and to the NC Council on the Holocaust for your support.

Be on the lookout next week for an email which will have link to this recorded discussion and links to the whole Ken Burns series, which is streaming on pbs.org and the PBS app.

And I wouldn't be a good ambassador of PBS North Carolina if I didn't say that, if you thought this was a compelling programming, please consider becoming a member of PBS North Carolina.

And if you are already a member, we appreciate you.

Thank you again, and I can't wait to see what you all do across the state.