Inheritance of Memory Holocaust Story Project
For educators

Teaching with Inheritance of Memory

Free, classroom-ready materials for middle school through university. Each lesson pairs survivor testimony with the second-generation reflections and journey maps at the heart of this project — grounding history in the lives of real families.

Lesson plans

Three ways into the stories

Each plan includes objectives, a procedure, primary-source handouts, and assessment prompts aligned to common history and language-arts standards.

Discussion questions

Connecting our stories to your world

From the book — by Flora Lee Ganzler and Kate McGerity.

Your personal responses to the stories

  1. Which of these survival stories particularly touched your heart? Discuss your reasons for choosing this story.
  2. Many of the children of survivors who shared their parents’ stories went to great lengths to learn about their family stories. Do you feel that learning one’s family story is important? If so, what could you do to learn more about your own family history?
  3. The title of this anthology, Inheritance of Memory, can mean different things to different people. After reading one or more of our stories, what does the title mean to you?
  4. What value do you see to reading these stories? What do survivors’ memories teach you that you can apply to your life, community, and country in the 21st century?

Connecting the stories to today’s world

  1. Discuss the actions of upstanders in some of our stories. What might an upstander look like today in a school setting, a community, our country, and/or the world?
  2. What are the potential risks and benefits of being an upstander? Do you consider it worth the risks to be an upstander?
  3. What similarities and differences do you see between these stories and immigrant experiences in the 21st century?
  4. Compare acts of discrimination in our stories to acts of discrimination in today’s world.
  5. The phrase “Never Again” can be interpreted in different ways. What does “Never Again” mean to you?

Considering the lasting impact on survivors

  1. Why do you think so many of the survivors in these stories chose to deny their birth identities by changing their names, ignoring their religious backgrounds, or not sharing their survival stories with their children?
  2. Fear of capture and deportation, and survivors’ efforts to avoid capture, dominates most of these survivor stories. What impact do you think this fear had on these survivors, even after the danger had been eliminated?

Analyzing the stories in this anthology

  1. Although each survivor story is unique, there are also some elements that recur in many stories. What do these commonalities tell you, in general, about what survivors went through to escape Nazi persecution?
  2. Choose a story and discuss its title. What does the title tell you about the survivor’s experience in the story?
  3. Compare the three main sections of this anthology. How do you interpret each section title, and what does it tell you about this group of survivor stories?
  4. Choose five words in the glossary that were new to you and discuss how they relate to specific survivors’ stories.
  5. Spend a few minutes tracing the survivors’ journeys on the maps in the book — or on the interactive maps on this site. What thoughts and feelings do they evoke about survivors’ journeys from fear to safety?

↓ Download the Discussion Question Pack (PDF)

Files are provided free for educational, non-commercial use. Please credit the Holocaust Story Project.