Video and Software
The below resources will help bring your experience of the Holocaust to a new level. The online video clips, films about the Holocaust, and interactive software will bring history alive. Exploring the below resources will give you a insight and move you much differently than just reading alone would.
Interactive Software
Lest We Forget: A History of the Holocaust
URL: http://remember.org/lest/index.html
Publisher: Endless Interactive, Logos Research Systems, 1996
Format: CD-ROM
Description: This CD-ROM contains features such as archival film footage, historical speeches, photographs, biographies, and interactive maps. Exploring each section of the CD will give you a greater insight into the Holocaust.You'll be able to listen to the actual German speeches (subtitled) and explore interactive maps of ghettos, camps, and even transportation routes
Return to Life: The Story of the Holocaust Survivors
URL: http://www.classroomscience.com/c/product.html?record@TF21880+s@Do5xeOqcATNUQ
Publisher: The Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, 1997
Format: CD-ROM
Description: This CD-ROM has to do with life for Jews after WWII. Through interviews, photographs, and film footage this CD describes what survivors had to go through once they were free. This software will help you understand that even though the war was over life did not go back to business as usual. Many had to deal with depression, rebuilding homes, and the guilt of being a survivor. The Holocaust was devastating both in the millions that were lost and in the aftermath that the survivors had to face.
Online Video Resources
Holocaust Movies(Teachers Guide to Holocaust)
URL: http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/MOVIES.htm
Format: Website
Description: This site contains movie clips related to the war. There is some archival footage, but most clips are survivors telling their story. Clips are separated by speaker and give a brief description of what they will be speaking about.
As a side note, if you're looking for just images, be sure to check out the image gallery. It contains archival, modern,and art images pertaining to the Holocaust
SHOAH Foundation Institute
URL: http://college.usc.edu/vhi/
Format: Website
Description: The SHOAH Foundation's goal is to video tape as many Holocaust witnesses interviews as possible. Eventually, they aim to digitize every single interview. At the moment, there are are a few clips that you are able to view online divided into sections such as pre-war, hiding,and concentration camps.
Steven Speilberg Video/Film Archive
URL: http://resources.ushmm.org/film/search/index.php
Format: Website
Description: An archive of over 800 hours of film from 1920 to 1948. Footage covers a wide range of things from Nazi rallies and Hitler speeches to concentration camps. Some of the footage, especially the speeches, are in German, but still make for an interesting watch. As a warning, the footage does go into the concentration camps after liberation and some images are graphic.
Films
Below is just a small selection of films available. For a complete listing of all Holocaust Films, please visit A Teacher's Guide to Holocaust: Videography
Anne Frank: The Whole Story
Publisher: Walt Disney Video, 2001
Rating: Not Rated
Format: DVD
Summary: Based on Melissa Muller's critically acclaimed book, ANNE FRANK goes beyond the story you already know and paints the true portrait of Anne both before and after she went into hiding. Get to know the high-spirited and popular girl before the war, and experience the challenges of the brave people who risked their lives trying to keep her safe. ANNE FRANK also explores the enduring mystery of who betrayed the Frank family and reveals what happened next. -- From Product Description
Review: the incredibly moving complete story of Anne Frank, going beyond what the Jewish teenage girl wrote in her widely read diary. Anne, along with her family and friends of her family, hid in a secret annex behind her father's office in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She dutifully kept a diary, which became a worldwide bestseller when her father published it in the 1950s. The story has been adapted for television and movies before, but this version, which played on ABC television, moves beyond what Anne wrote, meeting up with the Frank family before Anne receives her diary, and following her past the diary's last entries into Auschwitz and Birkenau. Hannah Taylor Gordon is a superb Anne, bringing to life the multifaceted girl, in turns intelligent, dreamy, creative, spoiled, and bratty, a girl like any other except that Anne is a Jew in Nazi-occupied Holland. The only one who outshines Gordon is Ben Kingsley as Anne's father, Otto Frank. His quiet performance is extraordinarily powerful; as he watches his family slip away, it is impossible not to feel his grief. This brave film is difficult in parts to watch--the concentration camp scenes are brutal--but this is a remarkable adaptation of Anne's life, and it is a film to be shared and discussed and remembered. -- Jenny Brown, Amazon.com
Life is Beautiful
Publisher: Miramax, 1999
Rating: PG-13
Format: DVD
Summary: In this extraordinary tale, Guido (Benigni) -- a charming but bumbling waiter who's gifted with a colorful imagination and an irresistible sense of humor -- has won the heart of the woman he loves and created a beautiful life for his young family. But then, that life is threatened by World War II ... and Guido must rely on those very same strengths to save his beloved wife and son from an unthinkable fate! Honored with an overwhelming level of critical acclaim, this truly exceptional, utterly unique achievement will lift your spirits and capture your heart! -- From Product Description
Review: Would that it were. The great, donkey-faced Italian clown Roberto Benigni attempts an ambitious fable of comedy's redemptive power. He plays an Italian Jew who keeps alive his little boy's innocence in a Nazi concentration camp by pretending that the routines of the camp are no more than an intricate game staged for his son's benefit. After all, Benigni appears to be saying, the Germans were indulging a fantasy, too-the fantasy of total control. But Benigni's ironic counter-reality undermines this movie, not the Nazis, who were beyond ridicule for the same reason that they were beyond rationality. Totalitarianism makes the fantastic literal-that is its demonic appeal. Benigni's jokes and games just aren't enough, and you leave the movie thinking that what's touching is not Benigni's ministrations to the little boy but his own need to believe in comedy as salvation. -David Denby, The New Yorker
Schindler's List
Publisher: Universal Studios, 2004 (movie release 1993)
Rating: R
Format: DVD
Summary: The film presents the indelible true story of the enigmatic Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, womanizer, and war profiteer who saved the lives of more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust. It is the triumph of one man who made a difference, and the drama of those who survived one of the darkest chapters in human history because of what he did. - From Product Description
Review: Based on a true story...Oskar Schindler, a German businessman in Poland who sees an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' rise to power. He starts a company to make cookware and utensils, using flattery and bribes to win military contracts, and brings in accountant and financier Itzhak Stern to help run the factory. By staffing his plant with Jews who've been herded into Krakow's ghetto by Nazi troops, Schindler has a dependable unpaid labor force. For Stern, a job in a war-related plant could mean survival for himself and the other Jews working for Schindler. However, in 1942, all of Krakow's Jews are assigned to the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp, overseen by Commandant Amon Goeth, an embittered alcoholic who occasionally shoots prisoners from his balcony. Schindler arranges to continue using Polish Jews in his plant, but, as he sees what is happening to his employees, he begins to develop a conscience. He realizes that his factory (now refitted to manufacture ammunition) is the only thing preventing his staff from being shipped to the death camps. Soon Schindler demands more workers and starts bribing Nazi leaders to keep Jews on his employee lists and out of the camps. By the time Germany falls to the allies, Schindler has lost his entire fortune -- and saved 1,100 people from likely death. Schindler's List was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and a long-coveted Best Director for Spielberg, and it quickly gained praise as one of the finest American movies about the Holocaust. -- Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
