IWitness Adds Activities and Clips in Three New Languages

IWitness is expanding its offerings for non-English speakers.

A trio of new activities have been published in three different languages: an Information Quest about Roman Kent (Polish), Homecoming: Hatred After the Genocide (Czech), and How Could it Happen? (Hungarian).

In the Roman Kent Information Quest, students watch testimony clips of Polish Holocaust survivor Roman Kent (in English with Polish subtitles) and construct word clouds representing the themes, emotions, people and places of his testimony.

The Czech activity includes testimony clips in which Czech survivors describe the hatred and intolerance they faced when they returned home after the Holocaust, and asks students to consider how intolerance affects current-day society and what they can do to promote positive change in themselves and others.

The Hungarian activity teaches students about the process of deception that led to the Holocaust. Students must write a short essay about why it is important to speak about the Holocaust today.

The Polish and Czech activities were written by USC Shoah Foundation’s regional consultants Monika Koszyńska and Martin Šmok, and the Hungarian activity was written by teacher and Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century graduate Mónika Mészáros.

In addition, the Watch page on IWitness now includes testimony clips in Czech and Hungarian.

The 23 new Czech clips are either spoken the Czech language or subtitled in Czech – 10 from the Visual History Archive’s Holocaust collection, four from the Rwandan Genocide collection, and nine from the Armenian Genocide collection. The clips cover the topics Anti-Semitism, Auschwitz, Postwar Life/Return to Life, Survival, Reflections on Genocide, and Deportation.

Three Hungarian-language clips on Perpetrators were also published, with another 15 clips coming soon.

The activities and clips in Hungarian, Polish and Czech reflect the growing need for IWitness content in the native languages of students and educators across Europe. Educators who wish to incorporate non-English testimony into their classroom activities now have access to curated testimony clips and activities in their own languages directly through the IWitness website.