Students' Day in Concentration Camp Canceled Due to Relative's Objections

BY HEATHER MAY

To teach her sixth-grade students about the Holocaust, Lehi Elementary teacher Brenda Grant likes to give them an idea of what it was like to live in a Nazi concentration camp.

Once a year, Grant turns her classroom into a kind of camp and has students pretend to be Jewish prisoners. Each student is given a Star of David to wear and is assigned a number to replace his or her name.

Grant, who has staged such camps for at least the past decade, planned to act as a concentration camp warden Tuesday, but canceled the exercise after a parent complained the "camp" was offensive.

"That's inappropriate. That's like having slave day," said Jemal Knowles, whose nephew is in Grant's class and who is acting as an unofficial family spokesman. The boy and his immediate family asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Knowles suggested Grant could make the same points about the Holocaust by showing a documentary or inviting a survivor to class.

"It doesn't do justice to the horrors that were done," said Knowles, who lives in West Jordan. "It demeans the memory of the atrocities."

Grant said she created the concentration camp to help students understand persecution. Acting it out, she said, conveys discrimination better than a book or movie can.

In past years, Grant has taken away students' book bags and made them clean desks and lockers, tasks that await them at the end of the school year anyway.

She also acts "stern," she said, making them do push-ups and jumping jacks if they talk or laugh. Students who aren't comfortable with the charade are allowed to research the Holocaust in the library.

"It really has a big effect on them," she said. "These kids are so babied here. When you talk about air raids they don't have a clue; when you talk about concentration camps they don't have a clue."

The lesson, she continued, "gets them out of their comfort zone."

Grant said she has used the "socio-drama" for several years, and no parent has ever complained. She does, however, receive many compliments from former students who say the day taught them more about the Holocaust than any other lesson on the subject.

Principal Dennis Nuckles said he supports Grant. "She is very, very committed and concerned about our kids understanding the horrors" of the Holocaust, he said. Rabbi Frederick Wenger of Salt Lake City said he would have to see how the lesson is presented to students to judge if it is appropriate. But from what he has heard, he believes Grant "was simply trying to sensitize the students."

Knowles, however, said his nephew was upset by the exercise.

Former student Jestin Simper said he didn't like the lesson, either. Now a seventh-grader, Simper said he had to eat lunch on the floor, weed a flower patch and was yelled at a lot.

"I didn't think it was a very good experience," he said. "I'd understand it just as much if somebody told us what they went through."

Grant said she probably won't re-create concentration camps in her classroom again.

"It makes me feel bad," she said of the controversy. "I do what I think works."

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