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Expert Advice

Area teachers involved in
Holocaust education listen
to Dr. Rolf Wolfswinkel
discuss Anne Frank and
offer insight in teaching
The Diary of Anne Frank
in the classroom.

Teachers get tips for teaching
students about Anne Frank.

N

oted Anne Frank, Holocaust
and World War II scholar Dr.
Rolf Wolfswinkel, New York
University professor of modern his-
tory, recently visited the Holocaust
Memorial Center in Farmington Hills
to present “A Girl Who Never Was.”
Attended by nearly 200 people, the
lecture shared details of the life of the
young diary writer and argued that
The Diary of Anne Frank does not rep-
resent the horror and abyss that was
the Holocaust.
The following morning, Dr.
Wolfswinkel met with 11 teach-
ers from the tri-county region to
have an informal discussion about
Frank, the German occupation of the
Netherlands, which took place from
1940 to 1945, and, importantly, to pro-

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February 9 • 2017

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vide teachers with insight on how to
teach The Diary of Anne Frank in the
classroom.
As a K-12 social studies consultant
at the Wayne Regional Educational
Service Agency, David Hale supports
teachers and schools in Wayne County
with developing social studies curricu-
lum, instruction and assessment. He
and his counterparts in Oakland and
Macomb counties were each asked by
the HMC to invite up to five classroom
teachers to attend the discussion.
“I thought about the experience all
day,” Hale said. “It is amazing to take
an iconic person like Anne Frank,
whom everyone feels they know about
already, and then have your under-
standing deepened by someone like
Dr. Wolfswinkel.”

The open discussion comes at an
appropriate time in Michigan. Last
year, Gov. Rick Snyder signed the
Revised School Code, House Bill 4493,
which requires that the board of a
school district or charter school must
ensure their schools’ social studies
curriculum for grades 8-12 includes
age- and grade-appropriate instruc-
tion about genocide, including the
Holocaust, for a total of six hours of
instruction.
When asked about his philosophy
for teaching the Holocaust to stu-
dents, Wolfswinkel said, “There’s no
excuse for not knowing the context
that horrible events took place. No
event can be so horrible that you hide
the knowledge of it from yourself. It
has happened, so I have to know.”

In his own doctoral disserta-
tion, Wolfswinkel, who was born in
Amsterdam, analyzed the literary
representation of Dutch collabora-
tion with the German Occupation
Government during the war. A mem-
ber of the advisory board of the Anne
Frank Center for Mutual Respect,
he was a visiting professor at the
University of Michigan in the 1990s,
the same time the school awarded
Miep Gies, one of Frank’s protectors,
the Raoul Wallenberg Medal.
The Holocaust Memorial Center’s
newest exhibit, “Anne Frank: A History
for Today,” which provides the story
of those living in the Annex against
world events before, during and after
the Holocaust and the war, is on dis-
play through June 4. •

