Front view of railcar with the ‘Selection of Hungarian Jews’ murals in the background on display on the third floor of the permanent exhibition of the USHMM.  The Nazis transported millions of Jews to concentration camps on railcars between 1942 and 1945.  For efficiency, as many as 80 – 100 people were crammed into each freight car.  Once sealed, the victims were forced to endure the journey with few provisions for heat, food, water, or sanitation.

Relationship to guideline

Even when teachers take great care to prepare a class for an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound.  For example, teachers often ask for the dimensions for train cars so that they can recreate this space and fill it with students to simulate the experience of victims who were deported in a train car. The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson, and even worse, they are left with the impression at the conclusion of the activity that they now know what it was like during the Holocaust.   In addition, while students leave class and go home at the end of the day, victims of the Holocaust had no relief.  Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are among the first to indicate the grave difficulty of finding words to describe their experiences. Even more revealing, they argue the virtual impossibility of trying to simulate accurately what it was like to live on a daily basis with fear, hunger, disease, unfathomable loss, and the unrelenting threat of abject brutality and death. The problem with trying to simulate situations from the Holocaust is that complex events and actions are over-simplified, and students are left with a skewed view of history. Since there are numerous primary source accounts, both written and visual, as well as survivors and eyewitnesses who can describe actual choices faced and made by individuals, groups, and nations during this period, teachers should draw upon these resources and refrain from simulation games that lead to a trivialization of the subject matter.