Feb 12, 2019 4 min read

When Leigh Ann Totty attended a 2008 summer seminar on the Holocaust at Columbia University in New York City, she became an Alfred Lerner Fellow.

As a member of this select group of educators already well-versed in Holocaust history, she received an invitation from the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous to participate in an intensive three-day academic seminar last month in New Jersey that explored a number topics addressing the history of the Holocaust.

“The email listed the speakers and gave details of their talks, and the application asked questions like why we wanted to attend,” said Totty, a Peters Township resident and English teacher at Bethel Park High School.

Participants were expected to complete required readings and writing assignments prior to the start of the program.

As one of 19 middle and high school teachers and Holocaust center staff from seven states who attended the seminar, Totty heard lectures by renowned Holocaust scholars that included Christopher R. Browning, professor emeritus at University of North Carolina; Joseph Benatov of the University of Pennsylvania; Samuel Kassow of Trinity College; Robert Jan van Pelt of the University of Waterloo, Canada; and leading British Holocaust education expert Paul Salmons.

Van Pelt, who the JFR describes as the foremost scholar on Auschwitz, talked about the exhibit titled “Auschwitz Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” that he organized in Spain. The project was conceived by Musealia and Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and curated by an international panel of experts including van Pelt and Salmons. The exhibit will be coming to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City on May 8.

To widen the scope of the seminar, van Pelt also touched on the Holocaust in the Netherlands, giving accounts of what people there experienced during the Nazi occupation.

Totty and students in her English class attended a performance last week of “Etty” at the Off the Wall Theater in Carnegie. The drama is an adaptation of Etty Hillesum’s diaries and letters written from 1941 to 1943. Through the voice of actor Susan Stein, who adapted the letters and diaries, the play shows how Hillesum sought the meaning of her life during the Nazi occupation. Unfortunately, her life ended tragically in Auschwitz at age 29.

Browning spoke at the seminar about his book “Remembering Survival,” a look at the micro-history of a small complex of labor camps in occupied Poland. Totty traveled twice to Poland with Howard Chandler, one of the survivors Browning interviewed for his book.

She invited Chandler to visit Bethel Park High School to speak to the 10th and 11th grade classes in the auditorium in December 2017.

Chandler, who now lives in Toronto, was from Wierzbnik, a small town in Poland that had three factories that allowed some Jews to stay and work until they were no longer relevant to the German war effort. The Nazis eventually sent Chandler, whose family name was Wajchendler before it was Anglicized, to Auschwitz, according to Totty. He departed Auschwitz in January 1945 on the death march and was transferred to another camp prior to his liberation.

“Being part of a small group allowed the seminar participants to ask more questions, take advantage of focused dialogue and discuss with the presenters and attendees ideas of how what we learned could be used in the classrooms,” Totty said. “I definitely walked away with new knowledge.”

In Pittsburgh, Totty said she attends most of the programs offered by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. In 2008, the center chose her and another teacher from the North Hills to attend the four day JFR Summer Institute for Teachers at Columbia University. Through the Agency for Jewish learning in Pittsburgh, she took her first trip to Poland in 2006. In addition to touring two concentration camps – Majdanek and Auschwitz, she also made stops in Warsaw and Krakow, studying what had been lost in those two cities during World War II.

In 2012, with the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, she made a study tour that took her to Germany and Poland. She made two additional visits to Poland in 2014 and 2016.