Investigate the evidence.
Understand the choices.

Choices Under Pressure

This case study asks how we analyse decisions when power is radically unequal. The purpose is not to decide whether people in the ghetto made “good” or “bad” choices from a safe distance. It is to identify who held power, what options were constrained or removed, and whose perspectives are needed to understand an event.

Before you begin: distinguish three things

• Power: who created and enforced the threat?
• Constraint: which options were blocked by violence, imprisonment, or the threat of collective punishment?
• Perspective: whose testimony or records do we need before drawing a conclusion?

When people witness injustice

The handbook asks learners to distinguish perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders and rescuers, and to examine the conditions that shaped people's responses. Fear, conformity, prejudice, self-interest, access to information and perceived risk may influence behaviour. Understanding these circumstances is not the same as excusing the consequences.

Key concepts: bystander behaviour, diffusion of responsibility, conformity and moral responsibility. The historical case must be selected and documented by the teacher; do not invent a named example.

Build an evidence-based response

Pause Before You Share

Learn to examine a message without being pulled along by its emotional force. First analyse historical propaganda in context; then practise checking claims online. Some techniques can recur across time, but similarities in technique do not make different events historically equivalent.

Language analysis studio

The handbook examines how language can label, stereotype, exclude, persuade, dehumanise or protect. Sort the fictional examples below. They are deliberately neutral training examples and do not reproduce historical slurs.

Now analyse a verified historical source selected by your teacher: Who created the message? Who was its audience? What emotions might it seek to evoke? Who is presented as “us” and who as “them”? What facts are omitted or distorted? Record the source's title, date, creator and institution before discussing it.

Write across time — with historical care

Use a documented testimony, diary or biography as the starting point for a reflective letter. Do not write in the voice of a real victim unless the task is explicitly a clearly labelled creative response, and never invent quotations or claim to know what a person would have wanted.

Choose one prompt:

• Write a letter to a future student explaining why one particular source should be preserved and read carefully.
• Write a letter to a museum or archive asking how it verifies, describes and preserves a testimony or object.
• Write a letter to your local community proposing one practical way to preserve knowledge of Jewish life and the Holocaust.

From memory to action: make your proposal specific, realistic and connected to what you have learned. It might involve researching a local trace, improving the description of a memorial, sharing a verified archive resource, or challenging an unsupported claim responsibly.

Discussion: historical propaganda and today's information environment

• What is the difference between a stereotype and a specific, verifiable claim?
• Why is “everyone is sharing it” not evidence that a claim is true?
• How can we compare propaganda techniques across time without claiming that every modern dispute is equivalent to the Holocaust?

A Suitcase, a Photograph, a Name

Objects and photographs can open a route into an individual story, but they do not explain themselves. Work from observation to questions, then to facts confirmed by a reliable record. This follows the handbook's object-based inquiry lesson.

Make a museum label

Write a 100–150-word label connecting one documented object to its owner or historical context. Include at least two details supported by the source, one limitation, and the exact archive or museum reference. Never invent a quotation or present imaginative writing as testimony.

“The Butterfly” — poetry, memory and Terezín

The handbook proposes an interdisciplinary study of Pavel Friedmann’s poem “The Butterfly” (1942), written in the context of the Terezín ghetto. Explore how literary images and contrasts can preserve a particular voice, while keeping the historical context and the limits of one poem in view.

Read and investigate: use a teacher-verified edition of the poem and a reliable historical source about Pavel Friedmann and Terezín. Do not reproduce an unverified text or treat a creative interpretation as a historical quotation.

• What contrasts does the poem create between the world inside the ghetto and the world beyond it?
• How does the butterfly function as an image or symbol? Which words support your interpretation?
• What can a poem reveal about a writer’s expression and perspective, and what historical questions require other sources?
• How does the historical context change the way you read the poem?

Creative response — clearly your own

Create a visual, sound-based or written response inspired by the poem’s themes. Label it as a contemporary response; do not imitate Friedmann’s voice or present new lines as his words.

Memory Detectives

Investigate traces of Jewish life in a local community: street names, buildings, cemeteries, maps, photographs, museum collections and oral-history records. A trace raises questions; it does not automatically prove a conclusion.

Designing a Memorial

Create a proposal for a memorial that is historically grounded and respectful. Identify whom or what it commemorates; the evidence used; the location and reason for choosing it; the words or symbols included; accessibility for different visitors; and one limitation or difficult decision. Do not use suffering as decoration or invent names and personal histories.