Inside IWitness: "Information Quest: Roman Kent"

Inside IWitness is an ongoing series that will profile each activity in IWitness, along with a clip featured in the activity and a teacher who uses IWitness in his or her classroom.

Students are introduced to a Holocaust survivor named Roman Kent in this Information Quest. Kent was born in Lodz, Poland, where he lived with his siblings, parents and dog Lala happily until the outbreak of World War II. The family was sent to the Lodz ghetto, where Lala miraculously followed them and stayed until the Germans took her away.

Roman and his brother Leon were separated from the rest of the family when they were all deported to Auschwitz and spent time at several concentration camps until they were liberated in 1945 on a death march to Dachau. Their sister Dasza died shortly after liberation, their sister Renia remained in Sweden and Leon and Roman went to the United States. Roman went to college, married and became a businessman and got involved in Holocaust education.

After reading Roman’s brief biography and watching a video about his life, students have a choice of nine different testimony clips to watch: “Childhood pet,” “resistance,” “arrival at Auschwitz,” and more. They build a word cloud about their chosen topic by selecting words that represent the subject, themes, people and places they learned about in the video and giving each word a color and size. The word cloud should illustrate a relationship among the different words.

Students give their word could a title, choose a significant quote from the clip, and reflect on their thoughts and feelings about the story topic they viewed.