Adam Herceg, a Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century graduate from Slovakia, marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day at his school on January 27 by showing testimony of a survivor his students already felt a strong connection to.

Herceg teaches history and Slovak language and literature at Pedagogicka a kulturna academia, a secondary professional school in the city of Modra, near the Slovak capital Bratislava. He participated in Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century, USC Shoah Foundation’s flagship professional development program for teachers in Europe, in Prague, 2013-2014.

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Herceg prepared a lesson using a variety of multimedia sources. He screened a short video about the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which was also January 27, 2015, and used historical documents from the ModernHistory.eu educational website to introduce his students to the roots of the Holocaust and establish historical context of the events.

Then came the “highlight” of the lesson, Herceg said: a clip from the Visual History Archive of Henrieta Kuttnerová, a survivor of Birkenau who comes from their region of Slovakia. In the clip, she spoke about surviving the local ghetto, deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau, and being a witness of the medical experiments on prisoners there.

Herceg said he has used clips of Henrieta in many of his lessons this year and noticed that in the January 27 lesson his students immediately recognized her and “felt like she was an old acquaintance of theirs.” Their reactions to her testimony included sadness, remorse, and also admiration for her for telling her story and happiness that she survived.

Testimony is an important tool for teaching the Holocaust because the personal element helps students to understand history and show them the fear and suffering that real people experienced, Herceg said. It’s also important to him that the testimony be connected to the region in which he and his students live.

“Students are interested in memories of witnesses, or the great history as it is reflected into human life in our region,” he said.

Herceg taught the lesson to a total of six different classes and groups of students on January 27 and the following week.

Martin Šmok, USC Shoah Foundation Senior International Training Consultant and leader of Teaching with Testimony in Czech Republic, praised Herceg’s work bringing testimony into the classroom.

“It is the work of teachers like Adam that enable survivors whose testimonies are preserved in the Visual History Archive to became teachers of the future generations, worldwide,” Šmok said.