Immersion Class
Posted by Gaby Labotka on 4/19/2007
On Saturday, March 23, three members of the Steppenwolf Young Adult Council participated in a Holocaust Immersion 2 Class; I was one of them. When I first got there, it was weird for me, because all of the teachers that were participating that day were introducing themselves by their first names. It was weird because I’m so used to addressing elders, especially teachers, as Mr. or Mrs. Last Name. Since they identified themselves so informally, as I introduced myself, we were equal; we were equally going to learn and experience what was going to happen in that class.
Since the majority of the participants weren’t there when I arrived, Robin, the instructor, told me to look around and explore the room. The room was empty except for tables lined up against the wall that had pictures, books, and paintings displayed on them. I looked through them trying to gather details and soak in what I was viewing: the Holocaust. They helped me, especially because I haven’t formally learned about the Holocaust in a few years. I had known what happened, and I had known who was involved, but I vaguely knew why it happened, and I didn’t know how it would feel to go through such a horrible time. But that was what we were going to try to understand that day.
One activity we had, I plan to incorporate into the next Drama Club meeting at my high school. Before the activity, we quickly went around the room again, looking at those pictures that I had already seen before and trying to get something new out of them. Robin then told us to pair up and label one person as “A” and one person as “B.” She instructed us to face each other, and labeled the “A’s” as the first sculptors and “B’s” as the clay. She told us to pretend that there were millions of strings coming from each joint in the clay’s body, and in order to sculpt we had to pull the invisible string to lead the clay into the desired position. The sculptors were supposed to use inspiration from the pictures and transfer feelings or images into their clay. I was a “B,” so my partner sculpted me first. It was a little tricky because we couldn’t speak, and if our partners didn’t communicate their movements well, it could get frustrating. I was sculpted into a position with my arms crossed in front of my eyes. When all the “A’s” were finished, Robin told us to go look at others’ sculptures as if we were in an art gallery. Robin then asked us what we felt from the artwork we had seen, and what we had felt when we were being sculpted. Then we switched and repeated; this time I was the sculpture. I moved my partner into a position where he was looking away from where his left arm was pointing and lunging away from it while his right arm was poised in front of his eyes. My inspiration was how the German people and the Nazis couldn’t see the horrible things that were going on in the concentration camps, or they pretended they didn’t know what was happening. In other words, they looked the other way and pointed fingers. The most emotional connection I had was after our break. Robin told us to go somewhere private, choose one of the people in one of our pictures, and write his story. So, I chose a little boy glaring at the camera man in a picture of some Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto. I couldn’t think of a name for him, but here is what I wrote:
I am only nine, and I have experienced more than you ever will, camera man. How can you bring your camera here? We aren’t animals for you to marvel at a zoo. Yes, we are in a cage, but we aren’t animals. I’m human just like you. My family was forced to move here. My father is in another ghetto; they forced us here while he was at work. I’m nine and I have to take care of my family. I know something bad is going to happen to me and you take a picture of me like a pig before the slaughterhouse.
After we were finished writing, we found partners and shared our stories with them. My partner had chosen the same picture of me, but a different child in the picture. She told me that the child had reminded her of a teacher she had worked with who had lived through the Holocaust. and of a woman who had come to the last Immersion 2 class to speak. The woman had to go into hiding when she was fifteen. In order to survive, she pretended that she was deaf and mute; she accomplished this by watching her dog’s ears. Dogs can hear before humans can, so whenever the dog’s ears would twitch, she knew there was a sound coming and she would brace herself to make sure she didn’t react.
These stories fascinated me. The fact that I had to pretend to be someone who experienced the Holocaust helped me to form an emotional connection aside from what I have felt from movies or books. Since I had to pretend to be someone who went through it, I had to feel the emotions I myself would have experienced had I gone through the same thing.
At the end of the class, we all joined each other in a circle once more and had a question and answer session between the teachers and students. The teachers asked us how they could incorporate what we had learned into their classrooms so that students will respond to their lessons. We told them that experiencing something always adds interest to learning. For me, aside from learning new theatre-related activities to bring back to my drama club, I had a glimpse of what those that experienced the horrors of the Holocaust went through. I made an emotional connection by making up and listening to stories that had that theme of prosecution.