At the moment of arrival, new prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau had no idea of what awaited them.  Their first encounter was with SS men shouting orders. This photograph shows the process of selecting some Hungarian Jewish prisoners for work and others for the gas chambers on their arrival at Auschwitz- Birkenau in 1944.  An SS officer pointed to the left or to the right, condemning old people, pregnant women, young children, and the infirm immediately to death in the gas chambers (Berenbaum 124).  Those who survived the first selection were registered for work, although the majority of prisoners were killed shortly after arrival (Berenbaum 127).

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, lessons that involve selecting some students from a group to continue, while others are not involved, might 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 to experience a selection process 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.  It is impossible to try to simulate accurately what it was like to experience this horrific event.  Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are among the first to indicate the grave difficulty of finding words to describe their experiences; however, 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.