Education Against All Odds
Throughout the Holocaust and in its aftermath, schools provided more than education. They offered places of refuge, of hope, and of recuperation. Teachers and students across Nazi Germany and its occupied territories went to great lengths to fight for education — and their lives.
Each photograph below highlights a remarkable story, similar to that of Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer Estelle Laughlin. Even when the Nazis banned Jewish children from attending school, she recalls the heroic teachers in the Warsaw ghetto who “met with hungry children in cold rooms and taught them to hold on to their imaginations and trust in love.” Teachers’ devotion to children like Estelle and her sister inspired the girls for the rest of their lives and both became educators.
Math Lessons
After surviving the Holocaust, this young girl was finally given the opportunity to attend elementary school at the Neu Freimann displaced persons camp in Munich. Camp administrator and photojournalist Jack Sutin documented the day-to-day experience of survivors like himself at the camp. Educating children and fostering new livelihoods was a top priority for displaced persons who sought to rebuild their lives.
Play Time
At the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School, refugee students learned Hebrew, as well as a wide variety of subjects from Chinese to engineering. Wolfgang Gotthelf (far right, partially hidden from view), whose aunt is the pictured teacher, was among the students who kept up their Jewish education. Shanghai served as an unexpected destination for an estimated 20,000 Jews who sought refuge from Nazi persecution. An established Sephardic community assisted new immigrants and helped form schools.
First Day
Following the German tradition, Berta Rosenhein’s parents gave her a Schultüte (school cone) filled with treats to celebrate a new school year in 1929. Berta was an exceptional student who was heartbroken when, years later, she and other Jewish students were banned from attending their secular high school. Despite her resistance to leaving her parents, they insisted she escape Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport when she was 15. She was sent to England and secured sponsorship to attend the Royal College of Art. Her parents, Irma and Walter Rosenhein, did not survive.
College Bound
After many harrowing experiences, Emanuel Tenenwurzel survived the Holocaust and went on to attend college with other displaced persons, seen here at a train station in Berchtesgaden, Germany, in 1947 or 1948. Emanuel (pictured leaning out the window) became a renowned psychiatrist in the United States, despite an early education that “stop[ped] at a fifth-grade level and resume[d] at being a graduate student.” He dedicated his career to studying the mindset and motivations of murderers and also advocated for mental health care for Holocaust survivors.
Making Music
Ella Schichtanz was a music teacher at a Catholic convent school in Hungary. Amid rising antisemitism, Ella confided in 1941 that she was Jewish to the school’s Mother Superior, who encouraged Ella and her daughter, Judit, to convert to Catholicism. Ella took Judit to pose for formal pictures in her communion gown, photographs that saved her on at least one occasion by corroborating her false identity. The Mother Superior helped the family find safe lodging multiple times during the Holocaust.
Read more about the fates of children during the Holocaust and the daily life of children in hiding.
