For Educators
A Guide for History Teachers
This site was built as a research resource, not a classroom tool — but the sources it documents are precisely the kind historians use to practise inquiry: photographs as evidence, exhibition panels as secondary sources, survivor testimonies as first-hand accounts, and the choices made by memorials as themselves a form of historical argument. The ability to read these sources critically — to ask what they reveal, what they assume, and what they leave out — is a skill History students need regardless of track or examination.
This page suggests how teachers can use the site alongside their classroom teaching: which sites connect to which content areas, and which pedagogical frameworks are most effective for the kinds of sources students will encounter here.
Syllabus Alignment (O-Level History 2174)
The sites documented across this project align most directly with the following areas of the O-Level History syllabus:
| Paper / Unit | Relevant Sites on This Project |
|---|---|
| Paper 1 — Nazi Germany Nazi racial policy, persecution of minorities, social control, occupied territories |
Auschwitz I & Auschwitz II–Birkenau; Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center (Jewish and Roma narratives); House of Terror, Budapest; Galicia Jewish Museum, Kraków; Apteka pod Orlem, Kraków; POLIN Museum, Warsaw |
| Paper 1 — War in Europe German expansion, occupation, resistance |
Warsaw Uprising Museum; Ghetto Heroes Square, Kraków; POLIN Museum; Auschwitz (Death March panel); Memorials around POLIN |
| Paper 2 — The Cold War Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, post-war order |
House of Terror, Budapest (Soviet-era exhibits); Communist Bratislava (walking tour) |
| Historical Inquiry (all units) Source analysis: reliability, utility, perspective |
All sites — photographs, memorial plaques, perpetrator quotations, victim testimonies, and museum curatorial choices can all be subjected to historical inquiry |
See, Think, Wonder (STW)
See, Think, Wonder is a Visual Thinking Strategy developed by Harvard Project Zero. It is particularly effective for introducing students to unfamiliar visual sources because it structures observation before interpretation — preventing students from jumping to conclusions before they have looked carefully.
What do you observe?
Look carefully at the photograph or exhibit. Describe what you see — people, objects, text, spatial arrangement — without yet interpreting.
What do you think about that?
What inferences can you draw? What does this source suggest or imply about the event, the people, or the period?
What does this make you wonder?
What questions does this source raise? What would you need to know more about to fully understand what you are looking at?
Start with a photograph from the Galicia Jewish Museum — a pre-war image of Jewish community life in Kraków. Students enter through a living world before encountering the destruction, which changes the cognitive frame entirely.
See: "I see a market street with traders and customers, a sign in Yiddish above a shop doorway, men in traditional dress."
Think: "This was a functioning commercial community. These people had ordinary lives, occupations, and neighbourhoods."
Wonder: "What happened to this street? Where did these people go? Are any of them still alive?"
Claim, Support and Question (CSQ)
Claim, Support and Question is a structured framework for source analysis. It asks students to identify what a source asserts, find evidence within the source that supports that assertion, and then interrogate what the source does not say. It pairs naturally with the source-based case study format in Paper 1.
What does this source claim?
Identify the central argument, assertion, or message of the source. What is it trying to communicate, and to whom?
What evidence supports the claim?
Identify specific details — words, images, data — within the source that support its main message.
What questions does this raise?
What is the source not telling you? What else would you need to evaluate this source fully?
Use the exhibit at Auschwitz displaying the written order from SS judge Thierack authorising the transfer of prisoners to the SS for "annihilation through work."
Claim: "This source claims that the legal apparatus of the Nazi state was used to sanction and disguise mass murder as a labour policy."
Support: "The bureaucratic language — transfer orders, official signatures, departmental stamps — presents killing as a formal administrative process. The use of the phrase 'annihilation through work' conflates labour with death."
Question: "Who else signed off on these orders? How was this document used in post-war trials? What is the source not showing us about the victims themselves?"
Suggested Learning Activities
Activity 1: Comparative Memorial Analysis
Compare how two national contexts memoralise the same event. For example: the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944 is documented in Budapest's Holocaust Memorial Center (from inside the Hungarian Jewish community's perspective) and at Auschwitz II–Birkenau (from the perspective of arrival and killing). What narrative choices has each site made? Whose experience is at the centre of each account?
This activity directly develops the ability to compare sources for perspective and purpose — a core skill in Paper 1.
Activity 2: Tracing One Event Through Multiple Sources
Follow a single event through several different types of source on this site. The 1944 deportations from Hungary, for example, can be traced through: (1) the deportation map at Auschwitz I showing rail lines; (2) the statistical panel showing scale; (3) the selection photograph panels; (4) the belongings display in Block IV. Ask students to construct a narrative from these sources and identify where gaps remain — what the sources cannot tell them.
Activity 3: Three Perspectives — Victim, Perpetrator, Bystander
This site documents all three voices. Sonderkommando testimonies (Zalman Lewental's buried notes, recovered after liberation) represent victim witness accounts. The Thierack order and SS administrative records represent perpetrator documentation. Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the Polish pharmacist who ran the only pharmacy inside the Kraków ghetto, represents a bystander who chose to help.
Assign each perspective to a group. Ask them to present what their source type reveals — and what it cannot reveal — about the same event.
Activity 4: Whose Story Is Being Told?
The guiding question of the broader research project applies equally in the classroom: What story is being told here, and who is being remembered? Students can apply this question to any site on the Holocaust Memory page — comparing how the Galicia Jewish Museum, the House of Terror, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum each frame who the subject of memory is. This develops historical thinking about the construction of narrative and the role of national identity in shaping what gets remembered.
A Note on Approaching Difficult Content
This site documents sites of mass atrocity. Some of the photographs and accounts are graphic, and some students will have family connections to the events depicted. Before using this material in the classroom, consider:
- Previewing the specific pages you plan to use, so students are not encountering distressing content unexpectedly.
- Establishing a shared understanding that historical study of atrocity is not gratuitous — it is a form of witnessing and a condition of preventing repetition.
- Offering an alternative task for students who need to engage with the material differently.
The Galicia Jewish Museum and the POLIN Museum pages document Jewish life before the Holocaust — a good entry point for classes encountering this subject for the first time, before moving to accounts of persecution and killing.