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TEACHING THE
HOLOCAUST

Grosse Pointe teachers and
students get a personalized version
of life during the Holocaust.

BY NOAM GELFOND

Special to The Jewish News

Until Holocaust survivor David
Bergman addressed a workshop for
teachers in the Grosse Pointe schools,
Holocaust information taught to stu-
dents there only amounted to a few
paragraphs gleaned from a textbook.
Today, Grosse Pointe teachers
are able to spend more time on the
subject as a result of program mate-
rials created by Bergman.
Bergman lectures at schools, and
has created a text, A Teacher's Guide
to the Holocaust, and a filmstrip, To
Hell and Freedom.
He has also just published a new
voluthe on the Holocaust, called Forty
Years After Auschwitz: The Long
Search for the Real Causes of the
Holocaust. It is just one part of a
multi-media educational guide for
those wishing to extend beyond the
horrifying pictures and stories. It
completes another chapter in
Bergman's recovery from captivity in
Nazi, concentration camps.
"If all we can ever learn of the
Holocaust are. the atrocities, then we
would only be scratching the surface,"
he says. "The invisible forces that
created the Holocaust are beyond the
limits of what the eyes can see be-
cause they are deeply embedded
within the core of the human mind."
Robert Welch, director of secon-
dary education for Grosse Pointe
schools, was responsible for introduc-
ing Bergman and his multi-media
program to the Grosse Pointe system.
Welch incorporated Holocaust litera-
ture into the curriculum for 15 years,
and he observes, "There's an immense
amount of 'material and it's a major
curriculum problem to get people to
decide what's crucial."
Welch is an outspoken advocate
of Holocaust instruction. "I'm a strong
supporter of communicating about the
Holocaust," and he finds the filmstrip
and teacher's guide "very beneficial."
Many others in the Grosse Pointe
system agree. More than 50 middle

and high school teachers from the
area attended a - seminar this Spring
where Bergman lectured, helping the
educators to fortify their Holocaust
instruction with his materials.
Burl von Allmen teaches social
studies at Grosse Pointe South High
School. "I'm a firm believer that you
have to keep this fresh in the minds of
young people. As succeeding genera-
tions go by, I think it's the responsi-
bility of people, especially social
studies teachers, to remind students
of what happened."
Like most history or social
studies teachers, von Allmen incorpo-
rates Holocaust study as part of his
World War II classes. .
Grosse Pointe North teacher
Conrad Behler invited Bergman to
speak directly to his European history
class, and the students viewed the
filmstrip in addition to the time Be-
hler normally spends teaching the
Holocaust.
Behler says that Bergman's pre-
sentation awed his students. Even
though Behler warned his class be-
forehand of what they would see and
hear, "They came away with a sense of
almost disbelief." Behler adds,
"Bergman's materials differ from most.
others, like the textbooks, in that it is
so personal. The impact is multiplied
when he comes in after the students
have seen the filmstrip."
One of these students, Steve
Cubba, concurs. "It's hard for us to
understand just how very, very bad it
was. But I learned the seriousness of it
and it's still hard to comprehend. The
idea of losing his whole family and
having no one else really made me stop
and think."
It's ironic, if not miraculous that
Bergman has developed into a pub-
lished author of three large volumes
based on his experiences, as well as a
filmstrip, taped cassette, and a forth-
coming videotape of his workshop.
After being liberated from the

■

David Bergman makes a point with
Grosse Pointe teachers.

camps in 1945 he returned to his na-
tive Czechoslovakia to find he was the
sole survivor of his family. When rela-
tives in America sent for him, he set-
tled in Cleveland where he went to
school until being drafted into the
U.S. Army in 1952.
Until that time, Bergman sup-
pressed all his memories and
thoughts of his experience. But dur-
ing his military basic training he was
told he must go through, a tear-
gassing exercise with his unit, an ex-
perience eerily similar to the gas
chambers he had feared less than a de-
cade earlier. Until then, Bergman
was able to suppress his feelings. As
he puts it, "I was laughing on the out-
side, but totally devastated on the in-
side."
After fooling everyone else, he
found he could no longer fool his con-
scious or his subconscious mind.
Shortly before the gassing exercise,
one of his legs went unexplicably lame.
Then the other. Within a week he was
totally paralyzed.
The doctors found no medical
cause. He was then questioned by a
psychiatrist. When Bergman ex-
plained what he went through in the
camps, the cause of his paralysis was
easily diagnosed. He was excused
from' the gassing exercise and soon
after the paralysis disappeared. It was
then that Bergman first realized the

power of the mind and the importance
of communicating.
Bergman is proud to add that
even though he was offered a medical
discharge, he chose to prove his men-
tal and physical strength by insisting
he be allowed to complete his tour of
duty and "pay back my debt to
America for liberating me." In 1956,
he returned home from the service
with an honorable discharge.
The great outflow of his feelings
did not begin in full until nine years
later, in 1965. His wife Sharon asked
if he had anything she could use to
mold the clay figures she produced.
He impulsively shaped two copper
figures — a father and son.
He was complimented on them
and despite the absence of earlier ar-
tistic inclinations, he spent uncounted
hours bending, twisting and fusing
copper pieces into replicas .of his Au-
schwitz memories. Bergman found he
could express his anger and suffering
through these models without actu-
ally having to talk about it.
But when public interest in his
work grew, he took his experiences on
the road, talking to school groups of
all ages. Though painful, he found the
talks helped him learn about himself
and educated others at a time when
the Holocaust was not openly dis-
cussed.

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