Local teacher plans Holocaust education tour

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/01/2024 (629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kelly Hiebert is not content to sit on his laurels.

In 2021 Hiebert was honoured with both the Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Manitoba Excellence in Education Award, and in 2023 was named a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Among other achievements, those accolades recognized the way in which the Westwood Collegiate history teacher and founder of the Westwood Historical Society inspires his students to delve into, understand, and learn from historic events, including the Holocaust, and use those lessons to commit to making the world a better place.

While the provincial government only recently mandated Holocaust education in all schools, Hiebert has been teaching about the systematic state-sponsored persecution of European Jews since he first stepped into a Westwood classroom 16 years ago. He has enlightened hundreds of students about the events and climate that led to the Holocaust, and encouraged thoughtful discussion and debate about other atrocities and the need to speak up about human rights abuses. His commitment to experiential learning opportunities has seen him facilitate the making of a poignant student documentary film about the rise of hate, and lead a group of students on a tour of Holocaust memorial sites in Europe.

Now he is offering a similar opportunity to Manitoba educators.

That opportunity is the Holocaust Education Teachers Training Program scheduled to take place in July 2025.

“The mission of the Holocaust Education Teachers Training Program is to provide an intellectual and experiential learning experience,” Hiebert explains. “The program seeks to equip teachers with the tools to inspire their students to think critically, to be aware of their responsibility to society, and to confront antisemitism and hate.”

“I have been lucky to have met and know many Holocaust survivors,” he adds, “and they inspire me to continue to bear witness for their stories and what happens when we remain silent to hate.”

The fifteen day professional development tour will explore Holocaust memorial sites in Poland, Austria, and Germany, including the concentration and death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and Mauthausen. It will walk participants through the former and once vibrant Jewish districts in Krakow and Vienna, as well as through the streets of what was the infamous Warsaw Ghetto.

The tour will be led by Hiebert and Dr. Jody Perrun, who teaches history at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, and who has organized and led several other European historical tours.

Prior to the tour, participants will be expected to sit in on a series of lectures and bonding-type activities, but the primary educational component of the program will take place in Europe.

“When you read it in a book, history is abstract and far away,” Perrun says. “It happened to other people, people you can’t relate to very easily. You gain a much deeper understanding of the events when you go to the places where it happened, walk the streets, see the memorials and museums, visit the camps. It becomes concrete rather than abstract (and) you better understand that real people were involved, and it could have been you.”

Holocaust education, Perrun continues, is important because it teaches us what can happen when we forget or ignore our common humanity and separate ourselves into groups of “us” and “them,” based on ethnic, religious, or other cultural differences.

“Look around the world at almost any time,” he adds, “and you can find enough examples of the violence that happens when people are separated into majority and minority groups for these kinds of reasons, whether they are Jews, Rohingya, Uyghurs, Yazidi or Tutsi.”

That separation and othering has made Canadian Jews feel especially vulnerable lately.

“Jews often don’t feel safe to identify themselves as Jews, and that is not the kind of country that Canada is supposed to be,” Perrun says.

Recognizing the need to change that narrative, several local teachers from a range of cultural backgrounds, experiences and grade levels, have already expressed an interest in crossing the ocean and stepping back in time with Perrun and Hiebert. Other teachers who might be interested in doing so are invited to visit the Holocaust Education Teachers Training Program website at mbholocaustinitiative.wordpress.com.

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