The question cards are designed to support a visit to the Museum’s Permanent Exhibition The Holocaust by encouraging observation and dialogue between students, teachers, and chaperones both at the Museum and in the classroom. When student groups arrive at the Museum, students receive one of five different color-coded question cards that encourages them to focus on a particular theme as they walk through the Permanent Exhibition. Each card features a historical image from the Museum’s collection with a question relating to its theme. On the reverse is a question common to all the cards, encouraging students to identify an image or object that had special meaning for them.
Encourage students to use the cards during their visit as they walk through the Permanent Exhibition. Students may go through the Permanent Exhibition either individually with a single card or with a partner in order to discuss the themes from their cards along the way.
PDF versions of the cards are available, and group leaders may want to show their students examples of the cards and what they will receive at the Museum during their visit.
It is highly recommended that the group leader facilitate a follow-up discussion with the students after the visit.
Theme Questions
THE ROLE OF BYSTANDERS
-
Nazis and local residents look on as Jews are forced to get on their hands and knees to scrub the pavement. Vienna, German-incorporated Austria, March–April 1938. –USHMM, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Make a mental list of the places you see bystanders or observers in photographs—what are these observers looking at and what are they doing? -
A woman, concealing her face, sits on a park bench marked “For Jews only.” German-incorporated Austria, ca. March 1938.–US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Wiener Institute of Contemporary History
What policies and actions did the Nazis implement to remove Jews from society and later to eliminate them? -
Three Jewish partisans in the Parczew forest near Lublin. Poland, 1940–45. –USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem
In what ways did the victims of the Holocaust respond to the oppression of the Nazis? -
The front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from November 11, 1938, with the article "700 Jews Seized by Secret Police in Berlin, More than 1400 in Munich." St. Louis, Missouri, November 11, 1938. –USHMM, courtesy of St. Louis Post-Dispatch, copyright 1938
What effect did the media—newspapers, editorial cartoons, film footage, and radio--have during the Holocaust? -
Viennese Jews wait in line at a local district police station to obtain exit visas. Vienna, German-incorporated Austria, 1938–39. – USHMM, courtesy of Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte
How did the United States and other countries respond to the events of the Holocaust? -
Hall of Witness, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Which photograph or artifact in the exhibition has special meaning for you about the history of the Holocaust?
This publication has been funded in part by a gift in memory of Simcha, Gisele, Eva and Leah Münzer.
