When Rachel Metalin, a high school literature teacher, wanted to offer her students an opportunity to go on a Holocaust education tour in eastern Europe, she quickly learned that a non-denominational tour for students didn’t exist.
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“The only high school trip that was being offered was March of the Living, which is offered mainly to Jewish students. There wasn’t really an opportunity for a non-Jewish, non-denominational group to embark on this kind of journey,” said 36-year-old Metalin, who has been teaching at Upper Canada College, an all-boys private school in Toronto, for 11 years.
“So, I decided to start one myself.”
Answering tough questions
Metalin said she began teaching Night by Elie Wiesel, and If this is a Man by Primo Levi years ago, and her students asked questions she felt she couldn’t fully answer unless she had visited the sites.
“I’ve always had a strong interest in the history of World War II, and the Holocaust specifically, but I had never been to any of the sites in Poland,” she said.
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In 2010, she participated in a Holocaust educators’ study tour that travelled to Germany and Poland.
Following the tour, she took part in programs offered by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
After deciding she wanted to offer her students an opportunity to take a Holocaust education tour, she worked to use what she had learned to try her own hand at guiding.
First tour of Holocaust sites
In 2014, she led her first 10-day tour that took 12 students to Holocaust sites in Europe, and following the success of that trip, she brought 11 more to sites including Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Mauthausen in 2016.
Metalin is currently working to take another group of students on a tour in March 2018.
“Some of these teens are going to be future leaders of the country… The majority of our trip is made up of non-Jewish students from different countries… Christian students, Muslim students,” she said.
“I think it’s a really meaningful thing, even if you’re not directly affected through culture or history, that these students give up their March break, time with friends and family, and part-time jobs to join the trip, and their parents sacrifice a lot to send them on a trip like this.”
Metalin also established the Ethel Eisen Bursary, named after Holocaust survivor Max Eisen’s mother, who was murdered at Auschwitz. People can donate to allow a student, who couldn’t otherwise afford the $6,200 it costs, to participate in the tour.
Her neighbour, Jennifer Houston, one of the donors, even opted to join the tour herself to learn more about the Holocaust. Metalin’s father, Sam, also volunteered as a chaperone on the first two trips.
Empathy and Horror
In a thank you letter to the donors who contributed to the Ethel Eisen Bursary, a recipient wrote, “The sympathy I had for the victims and their living conditions in Auschwitz when I saw a picture of the barracks prior to the trip, cannot compare to the empathy and horror that I felt standing in the exact location where 700 people – the population of my entire school – were forced to sleep each night. It was at that moment, in a barrack in Birkenau that I realized the true immensity of the Holocaust and the great lengths the Nazis went to create ‘factories of death’ in an attempt to exterminate an entire race.”
Metalin shared a story about one of her students who participated in the 2016 tour.
“[He] grew up in a country where they did not provide any Holocaust education whatsoever… so he decided to do some of his own research online,” she said.
“He came across some valid Holocaust information, but he also came across Holocaust denial websites, and he was genuinely confused about the Holocaust and what had actually happened.”
Following an emotionally and physically draining day touring Auschwitz-Birkenau, Metalin found him sitting outside his hotel room.
“He was weepy and teary… He looked at me and said, ‘It all really happened.’ And he started crying. That impacted him tremendously, and since then, he’s been asking for books and he’s been doing his own research through the right channels. It was just a pivotal moment for me as an educator.”
For more information, Metalin can be reached at [email protected].
