It worked for me: key stage 2 cameos
Contents | Spying on Stephenson:
a reconstruction relay 
Remembering the Holocaust
As part of the ‘Britain since 1930’ topic, the year 6 team at Oak Meadow Primary School in Hampshire marked Holocaust Memorial Day using a number of activities including one based on Hanna’s suitcase by Karen Levine.
Hanna’s suitcase is the remarkable story of how a young curator of a Japanese Holocaust museum, Fumiko Ishioka, was compelled to discover the truth about what happened to Hanna Brady, a German-Jewish orphan. Her search took her across three continents and back in time to the darkest days of war-torn Europe. The story details the clues that Fumiko followed in her tenacious search for information.
After setting the scene the teachers gave the pupils an enlarged picture of the suitcase – the item originally sent to the museum and the catalyst for Fumiko’s investigation. It featured the name, Hanna Brady, the date 16 May 1931, and the word ‘waisenkind’ (the German word for orphan) painted across the front in white paint. They were asked to work in groups to interrogate the evidence to see if they could find any clues about the owner. They were encouraged to annotate the picture with their thoughts and ideas.
Initial impressions
The class had many ideas about the date on the case. Some thought it was Hanna’s date of birth; others thought it was the date of her death or capture. Most were sure the owner’s name was Hanna Brady and when they were told the meaning of ‘waisenkind’ they began to build up a picture of a small girl.
The children became fully involved with the task. They decided how they would find out more about this person. The children pooled ideas and the steps the curator took were gradually revealed and compared with the children’s ideas. The documents she found were put before them and the children deduced information from each document and noted down their findings.
Examining the evidence
The teachers presented the children with a register from Fumiko’s investigation and they quickly discovered Hanna’s name as well as another Brady named George. They deduced that this was likely to be Hanna’s brother, cousin or father. The children also noticed that George’s name did not have a tick next to it and were sad to hear that all the names with ticks beside them had been killed.
Hanna’s drawings of the trains arriving at Theresinstadt made up their minds that this was a little girl and they also spotted that there was a streetlight in the picture, deducing that it was probably night-time when the trains arrived at the camp.
After this the teacher filled in the gaps of what had happened to Hanna and her family and showed the class some pictures of her and her brother George as children. Then they were given a picture of Hanna and asked to write about what they had found out about her.
For obvious reasons the Holocaust has to be handled very sensitively
with year 6 children, but the use of Hanna’s suitcase
enabled the children at Oak Meadow Primary School to learn about it
through the experiences of a child who was their own age when she was
first sent to Theresinstadt concentration camp.
