Saskatchewan

After touring concentration camps, Regina teachers bring new history program back to classrooms

Four teachers from a Regina Catholic school made a trip to Germany in July, where they toured four concentration camps.

4 teachers spent July touring Germany, meeting Holocaust survivors

Teacher Milos Menhart said visiting the concentration camps required empathy to fully appreciate the death and destruction of the Holocaust. (Markus Schreiber/File/AP)

High school teacher Milos Menhart has studied the Holocaust for some time, but when he entered the remnants of a Nazi concentration camp where Jews were systemically slaughtered during the Second World War, the impact was still strong.

Menhart was one of four teachers from a Regina Catholic school who made a trip to Germany in July, where they toured four concentration camps. They are environments where visitors need to empathize with what it was like to be held in such a place.

Some Canadian youth who were also visiting the sites were brought to tears and some of them became numb to what they were learning, Menhart said.

"Some were somewhat disappointed in themselves that they didn't feel more."

Another site Menhart visited was the House of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis decided to eradicate the Jewish population — a move that later came to be called the Final Solution.

It is estimated more than 11 million people were murdered during the Holocaust, roughly six million of whom were Jews.

Exterior view of the house of the 'Wannsee Conference' in Berlin. In this house, on Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking representatives of the SS, the National Socialist German Workers' Party and various ministries met to discuss their co-operation in the planned deportation and murder of European Jews. (Michael Sohn/The Associated Press)

"It was very powerful to be in that room, in that building where it was just business-like to deal with people's lives like that," Menhart said. 

The tour is an experience the teachers will be bringing back to their classrooms, as part of a new history program by the Regina Catholic School Division, Menhart said.

He described the program as being based on being a global citizen, "being a witness to history," and ensuring the Holocaust doesn't "become a footnote in history."


With files from CBC Radio's The Morning Edition