Though they haven’t entered high school yet, Lauren Fenech is making sure her students understand the steps that can lead to genocide.

In her eighth grade language arts class at Inverness Middle School in Florida earlier this week, Fenech led her students in USC Shoah Foundation’s Pyramid of Hate activity. The activity integrates first-person testimonies from the Institute's Visual History Archive with the Pyramid of Hate, a curricular tool developed by the Anti-Defamation League for its A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE® Institute.

The pyramid illustrates the steps that lead to genocide, from prejudiced attitudes on the bottom of the pyramid to acts of prejudice, discrimination, violence and finally genocide at the top.

Through this exercise, students explore their own attitudes about, and experiences with, prejudice; examine the individual's roles and responsibilities regarding ethnic, racial, and religious bias; and think critically about examples of prejudiced attitudes, acts of prejudice, discrimination, violence, and genocide.

Fenech said her students were actually quite shocked by the lesson. It showed them the connections between everyday actions and the condition that lead to genocide.

“It forced the kids to look at themselves and ask ‘Do I have prejudiced 

attitudes?’” Fenech said. “It was very powerful. It was mind-blowing for them; they were in awe.”

Fenech will incorporate IWitness into her lesson on Kristallnacht later in her Holocaust unit, and she also brought Holocaust survivor Gene Klein to speak to the whole school.

Growing up in England, Fenech said, she was always passionate about the Holocaust. It was a turning point in history and it allows students to make real world connections between the past and present – and it’s especially important for her class this year to learn about it since they will be able to vote in the 2020 election, she said. She feels it would be an act against mankind if she did not teach them about the Holocaust.

“[The Holocaust] shows the inherent dangers of the human psyche, how normal people can commit atrocious acts,” she said. “How could we not teach it? It would be such a disservice to the survivors, liberators, resistors and their descendants.”

Photo of Lauren Fenech courtesy Marina Koelber