Jeannette Spiegel was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923. In 1938, everything changed for Jeannette’s family during Kristallnacht, the pogrom also known as the Night of Broken Glass.

Her parents sent her to Belgium to live with an aunt where they felt she would be safer. Jeannette’s last memory of her mother was of her mother crying in the apartment before left for Belgium.

Once in Belgium, Jeannette, now aged 16, managed to escape the Gestapo several times before being denounced by a Belgium citizen, arrested, and deported to Auschwitz. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Jeannette was not selected for immediate extermination.

By the End of this lesson, Students will be able to:

• Define the Holocaust as the planned and systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.
• Define antisemitism as prejudice against or hatred of Jewish people.
• Recognize the Holocaust as history’s most extreme example of antisemitism.
• Analyze the causes and effects of Kristallnacht and how it became a watershed event in the transition from targeted persecution and anti-Jewish policy to open, public violence against Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe.
• Draw parallels between the past and the present to understand why we must study history.
• Arm themselves with facts so that when they are confronted with Holocaust denial, they can speak out.

• Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm.org):

  https://www.ushmm.org/teach/fundamentals/age-appropriateness

• Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII’s Deadliest Concentration Camp:
  https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-concentration-camp-numbers

• Timeline of major events that occurred before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust:
  https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/resource-center/timeline.html

• Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII’s Deadliest Concentration Camp:
  https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-concentration-camp-numbers