Every year, some of Angela Gottesburen’s high school seniors enter an essay contest held by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. This year, the students are using testimony from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive to help craft their responses.

The 2016 prompt for the Midwest Center’s annual White Rose Student Essay Contest, open to 8th-12th graders, asks students to explore how one Jewish survivor was affected by the Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda.

“What I like about the essay is that it always has the students find a person that experienced the Holocaust through whatever happens to be the current essay’s topic,” Gottesburen said. “I love that they are able to take what they learn and then focus on a particular Jewish person and see exactly what the historical information meant at the time to Jews.”

Gottesburen is the school librarian at Lone Jack High School in Lone Jack, Missouri. Along with Bailey Appleton, she co-teaches a College English class. This year, the duo had ten of their students enter the White Rose contest. Six of them are now among the 10 finalists in the 10-12th grade category. Student Daniel Holsten, one of the finalists, wrote about how students can use their newfound knowledge of propaganda.

“As long as we learn from the tragedies and mistakes of the past, our generation will not repeat history, but instead we will make our own mark for the betterment of society,” he wrote.

"As long as we learn from the... mistakes of the past, our generation will not repeat history."

Typically the essay contest offers up sources for students to use in their responses. This year, however, Gottesburen’s students branched out and chose a person to focus on after exploring the Visual History Archive.

“The video testimony is so powerful, because, while reading survivor testimony is important also, students are able to put a face to a survivor, and hear by nuances and difficulties in speech how hard it is to remember this terrible time, and see how visibly shaken they are to recount these tragic memories,” Gottesburen said.

This isn’t Lone Jack High School’s or Gottesburen’s first time exploring the Holocaust in depth. Two years ago, the school did a cross-curricular event where in each class students explored a different aspect of the genocide, from learning about the medical experiments done on prisoners in science class to studying the Kindertransport in Child Development. The program has involved a more individual aspect.

“Every student received an ID card on a Holocaust victim, and every hour we read their victim’s story over the intercom, and the students discovered their fate,” she said. “If their person perished, they took their butterfly [which had been made in Art class] down.”

In addition to Gottesburen’s College English class, the students writing the essays are also in College History, in which they learn about the Holocaust as well. This assignment, however, also allowed the students to confront propaganda.

“What I love about what the students took away is how much more aware they are of propaganda, and tying it to their lives, that they must be vigilant and be seekers of the truth, and not followers of what is given to them,” Gottesburen said.

Winners of the contest will be announced on May 11.