Holocaust Survivor Testimonies and Memoirs
Holocaust Survivor Testimonies
During 2018-2019, the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach collaborated with Names, Not Numbers and five schools from Miami-Dade County to create a series of Holocaust documentaries featuring survivors from South Florida.
Names, Not Numbers is a Holocaust documentary film project offered to schools around the United States. In each school, students learned the main aspects of filmmaking from journalists and filmmakers, including research, interviewing techniques, filming techniques and editing, to prepare them to interview and film survivors themselves. The schools that participated in this project were Feinberg-Fisher K-8, Hebrew Academy Middle School, Miami Beach Senior High School, Miami Coral Park Senior High School, and South Miami Senior High School.
Our collection includes ten short films of each Holocaust survivor who participated in the Names. Not Numbers project, along with a link to a lesson plan especially created for each survivor. Their interviews and lesson plans are available for classroom use and for student research.
Survivor Testimony Access: The films are password protected.
The Last Ones
Our partners at The Last Ones provide an invaluable educational resource that preserves the voices of Holocaust survivors for future generations. Through brief, unscripted interviews, survivors share their stories in authentic ways that deeply resonate with learners of all ages.
Explore The Last Ones to enrich teaching and learning, and to help ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust remain alive for generations to come.
Holocaust Survivor Memoirs
The Holocaust Memorial has collected the life stories of Holocaust survivors who either still volunteer or used to volunteer in the past at the Holocaust Memorial. These memoirs are an excellent way of connecting to the experiences of these remarkable people and the lessons their experiences have taught them.
To further explore and learn from these memoirs, a series of lesson plans have been created for grades 6-12. The series compares and contrasts the various experiences of the Holocaust survivors. Please click on one of the names below to access a specific lesson plan.
High School Holocaust Survivor Memoir Lesson Plan:
Middle School Holocaust Survivor Memoir Lesson Plan:
The Story of Holocaust Survivor Siggi B. Wilzig
Siggi B. Wilzig, born Siegbert Wilzig, on March 11, 1926, into a German Jewish family in the town of Krojanke in West Prussia, Germany. By 1945, 59 members of Siegbert’s family had been murdered in the Holocaust, and he was one of the few survivors in his family. In 1947, Siegbert came to the U.S., at which time he legally changed his name to Siggi Bert Wilzig — "Siggi B. Wilzig." He arrived in New York at 21, with only $240, no education beyond grade school, and no business contacts. By the end of his career, Siggi was the President, CEO, and Chairman of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and a multibillion-dollar commercial bank, who also dedicated his time and philanthropy to Holocaust education.
This three-part series of 45-minute lessons provides Middle and High School students with an introduction to the study of the Holocaust through the experiences of Siggi B. Wilzig. These lessons can be taught alone or in conjunction with Joshua M. Greene’s biography, Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig’s Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend, and the accompanying short film, I’m Still in Auschwitz. Excerpts of Unstoppable and I’m Still in Auschwitz are woven into each lesson.
The lessons focus on three distinct periods in the long arc of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, weaving the particular experiences of Siggi B. Wilzig into the larger narratives of antisemitism, the attempted destruction of the Jewish people, survival, and resilience.
Lesson Plan Access: Download the lesson plans (with Florida Holocaust education standards).