Though her students are only 10 or 11 years old, Suzi Gantz jumped at the chance to introduce them to IWitness for USC Shoah Foundation’s first elementary classroom pilot of a new IWitness activity.

Gantz’s fifth grade class at O. A. Thorp Scholastic Academy in Chicago is currently pilot-testing an unpublished IWitness Mini Quest activity: “Use Your Voice Against Prejudice.” USC Shoah Foundation staff reached out to elementary teachers in the Chicago area for any who would be interested in piloting an IWitness activity, and Gantz was selected after a brief screening process.

Gantz learned about IWitness through the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. She said she participates in as many of the museum’s teacher workshops and programs as possible and uses its resources to teach her students about the Holocaust.

“I am very passionate about teaching the Holocaust to children,” Gantz said. “I have many friends who never knew their grandparents because of the Holocaust and I am always searching for the never-to-be-found answers of why and how we could allow it and still allow all these genocides.”

Gantz said she sends a letter home to parents letting them know about the Holocaust unit, but she doesn’t shy away from teaching all its basic elements, including concentration camps, Nazis, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Final Solution. She also includes discussion of memory and culture, which she said her students “love.”

The pilot activity fits with Gantz’s teaching philosophy of educating her students about acceptance and tolerance. It uses acts of prejudice against Holocaust survivors to introduce students to the idea that small acts of hate can lead to violence.

“I think bullying is such a hot topic and is so relevant in these children's lives. In a perfect world these are the children to stop it,” she said.

The Holocaust offers an opportunity to teach young students not just about historical events, but the consequences of intolerance in their own lives, Gantz added.

“I don't teach the ‘grim and gruesome’ but an understanding of ‘man’s inhumanity towards man,’" Gantz said. “I believe you are never too young to learn to be kind to one another and be an upstander.”