Ousley Junior High teacher Mike Dunbar’s lesson on the Holocaust to his seventh-grade Texas history students was probably different than most going on throughout the state during last week’s Holocaust Remembrance Week in Texas.
Holocaust Remembrance Week is most definitely personal.
Dunbar recounted stories about his grandmother’s aunt Edith who was killed in the Holocaust after he showed the class a CNN 10 video about this month marking the 75th anniversary since the Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Dunbar showed the students a picture of Edith and also passed around a family heirloom antique cigar box that he was given that belonged to Edith’s father.
The lesson was a bit of a preview of a bigger and more in-depth lesson the class will do about the Holocaust later in the semester. But Dunbar made sure the students knew it was important, nonetheless. And personal.
“We will forget if we don’t retell these stories over and over again to the next generation,” Dunbar said.