Since she began her career as a classroom social studies teacher in 1997, Robin Blalock always made it a point to make the Holocaust part of her lesson plan.
“It’s been one of those subjects I just don’t skip,” said Blalock. “Because it is so integral for kids to understand how it started. What happened, and then what happen afterward for the Jewish people and for humanity as a whole.”
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With the recent anti-Semitic attacks reported in Pensacola in the last two weeks, Blalock feels students should learn the depths of human behavior to not only remember those who suffered but to prevent similar actions in the future.
"The graffiti makes it obvious that teaching about the Holocaust and antisemitism is of vital importance and needs to continue," she said. "The throwing of rocks through windows is worrisome as it is a step towards violence — windows were broken before violent acts began before."
After many years teaching in the Escambia County School District, Blalock is moving on and returning to the classroom at Santa Rosa High School where she’ll be closer to her home in Milton. More than a decade ago, she began attending workshops hosted by the Gulf Coast Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education in Mobile.
“In 2012, they offered to send me to the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous summer seminar in New York at Columbia University," said Blalock. "That was my first experience with JFR.”
For years, The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR), recognized people from all nations who saved Jews during the Holocaust. After attending that summer seminar and then their advanced seminar in 2020, Blalock qualified for this year’s European Study Program in Germany and Poland. With the Gulf Coast Center as her sponsor, she took off to actually see what she had been teaching for all those years.
Robin Blalock: It's a 13-day trip through Germany and Poland. We started in Munich with the background of how the Nazi Party came to power. (We) went to the site of the Beer Hall Putsch, (and) toured different parts of Munich. Then, we proceeded to Nuremberg, where we got to see Room 600, where the Nuremberg Trials took place. We went to Weimar, did some touring there. We went to Dachau, went to Buchenwald, then we proceeded to go into Warsaw. A little town called Sandomierz outside of Warsaw, where one of the early massacres happened. They took all of the Jews from Sandomierz and marched them to the woods. And the next day, there were no more Jews in Sandomierz. Then we proceeded to go to Krakow. In between, we went to (see) Auschwitz and Birkenau. So we started where Hitler came to power. We kind of traced through the different events of the rise of Nazi power. We stopped at the Wannsee House, where the decision about what the Final Solution would be. Spent some time studying that.
On our tour was a scholar named Robert Jan von Pelt who's one of the preeminent Auschwitz experts. So, he was our traveling scholar with us. We looked at the camps, but we also looked at what the thought process behind the Final Solution was and the architecture of the camps, and the architecture of the transportation. Then we finished up in Krakow, where we saw the side of the Krakow ghetto.
Bob Barrett: How much did you milk Jan von Pelton's brain while you were there?
Blalock: He's a wealth of knowledge. He challenges you at every thought. You ask a question and (he shoots back) then how do you know that? Or what makes you think that? So not only was he giving us information, but he was helping us figure out if kids ask us those kinds of questions — how do you respond to them? Because sometimes kids will throw you for a loop and ask you a question and you just kind of sit there and go, 'well, let's go look it up.' Because that's the best answer. Jokingly, I tell my kids I don't know everything because if I did, I'd work for Google not public education. Yeah, he's a wealth of knowledge and he's done firsthand research at Auschwitz and Birkenau in the 70s and 80s where he was into the archives and wrote a lot of the defining histories about the camp and how it worked and the architecture there.
Barrett: You've been reading about this and seeing pictures of this for years and talking about it and teaching it. Does being there, you think, make a big difference in the way you'll approach this in the future?
Blalock: Oh, absolutely. And I told Stanlee Stahl, who's the head of the (Jewish Foundation for the Righteous) and who traveled with us, that for years I've looked at concentration camps on the map. And you see how this many kilometers by this many kilometers or this many miles by this many miles but to stand at the roll call plaza at Dakau and realize that it's the size of three football fields. Or to go into Birkenau. And when we walked Birkenau, they took us on two different routes. One, is the original back-gate route that the Jews between 1941 and 1943 would have taken. Then to see the crematorium that was destroyed right before the Allies liberated the camp. And then they took us the route that the Hungarian Jews would have taken in 1943 and 1944. It's about a three-mile walk, which when you start walking that far, it puts it in a whole different perspective. When you look at some of the pictures of the people they say they just got off the train and they're going to walk towards what will be their end. Some of these people had been on trains for two, three, four, five days with no food and water. And then to face a two-and-a-half or three-mile walk, it just put the enormity of what was being done into a whole new perspective.
Barrett: How preserved are these sites?
Blalock: Dakau is recreated, there's nothing original there. (At) Treblinka there was nothing left to be found. So Treblinka's memorial is stones with the names of towns carved onto them as a lasting memorial to the towns that sent people to Treblinka, and Treblinka had an almost nonexistent survival rate. Auschwitz and Birkenau take the idea of reconstruction rather than replacement. So when they redo a site, like when we were there, they were redoing one of the women's barracks, they're using as many original materials as possible. So they'll go to partially destroyed pieces and take parts of it to help recreate if they can't use original materials and they document which pieces are not authentic. It just depends on their funding as to how authentic they are. Auschwitz and Birkenau, obviously being the most famous ones, are better preserved than some of the others that were destroyed right after the war.
Barrett: Who destroyed them? The Allies or the Germans before the allies got there?
Blalock: Mostly the Germans destroyed them because they didn't want a lasting record of what happened because they were losing. They kept meticulous records, which is how we know the Holocaust happened because they thought they were going to win the war and then they would have this documentation for the Thousand Year Reich. But when they started to lose, they didn't want anyone to know what they had done. So, several of the crematoriums at Auschwitz were blown up by the Germans as the Russian army was approaching. Treblinka was wiped out because it was an extermination camp. Once they thought they were done with it, they just destroyed it.
Barrett: Were you able to interact with any of the locals who lived around the areas?
Blalock: Not so much, because most of these are like going to a national park where you pay entrance to get in and it's very curated. We did have the opportunity to have lunch at Polin, which is a Holocaust memorial museum in Warsaw. And the luncheon we had was with the Righteous Among the Nations. So there were twelve rescuers from (the) Warsaw area that were able to come and have lunch with us to kind of celebrate them for the things that they did in order to help people that they were not going to benefit from.
Barrett: The JFR still supports some of those families, right?
Blalock: They do. For the people who have been designated as Righteous Among the Nations that they've been able to contact, they offer some financial support as kind of a compensation after the fact. To become a Righteous Among the Nations, when you rescued the Jews, you could not have taken any compensation at the time. I had lunch with Anna Bando, whose family, she and her family rescued an 11-year-old girl from the Warsaw ghetto. Not for anything for them at the time, just because they thought it was the right thing to do. And now she gets some support from the JFR in her old age. They said in 2019, they had 40 righteous at the luncheon. This year, we had 12.
Barrett: Well, there are fewer and fewer survivors now. So, how important is it to get as much documentation of this as there possibly can be?
Blalock: Absolutely. There's no doubt that we need to document it. There's the old quote, 'Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' And unfortunately, if this kind of passes into memory without it being brought up again, those people and the things that they did or the things they survived will cease to exist. One of the teachers that I was on the trip with put it very succinctly that we are the last living links to the people who survived the Holocaust. Those who teach it now and then any of the students that we're able to expose to survivors who are still here. When we're (no longer) in the classroom, or when our kids aren't around, there will be no living links to that history anymore. So for us to document it, to tell their stories, is imperative, that they don't just become statistics on a piece of paper.
Barrett: And the deniers are getting more and more oxygen, it seems.
Blalock: Unfortunately, yes. I haven't had to deal with them too much in a classroom. Occasionally you'll run across an adult who says, this just doesn't happen. If there's no proof, if you can't prove this. There's too much documentation. There are too many accounts written for it to just be, as they call hokum, or made up or fake news.
Barrett: So how will this change the way you approach it in the classroom?
Blalock: I told JFR when I put it on my application. I said I had used pictures for years from friends who had gone, or out of books. I said I wanted pictures that I knew and I could understand. So I have pictures now of the roll call plaza, exactly how big it is, because I took a picture from one end and didn't zoom it, and there's a light at the other end so that the kids get this idea of perspective that these are massive places. I have newer pictures of what the camp setting looked like, how large they are, how many buildings there are, and what the inside of buildings looked like, to give them an idea that these conditions were horrible. They were conditions that we wouldn't put our worst enemies in, and they put people in them, not really considering them people. So, it's easier for me to say, OK, this is what this looks like. And having stood there, I can give them a better idea of what it feels like, too — to walk into a barracks at Birkenau and realize that when they talk about bunks, the bottom bunk is actually the floor. So people were sleeping on the floor, and then two bunks above them, and 700 people in a building the size of two classrooms just piled on top of each other. That the enormity of how disregarded the Jewish people and the other people in the concentration camps were at this time.
Barrett: Going into a new school. Are you saying, 'hey, look what I just did.' Can I do some curriculum doing this?
Blalock: I met with my principal. He was very excited about the tour, and that I had gone on, and he's a former social studies teacher, so that helps. I'm new at the district, so I'm not sure who to be in touch with, but I'm sure that'll come down the line. I still do curriculum development and help with workshops for the Gulf Coast Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education. They have the ability to call me and say, ‘Hey, we need this resource, or we have someone who wants a lesson plan or somebody who wants you to come help them do a workshop.' So there are ways that I can give back for the opportunity that I got and share that information with people who aren't able to go on the same kind of trip.
Robin Blalock is preparing for a new school year at a new school. She’ll meet her new students when the school year begins on August 10.
