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Europe’s East, the Second World War, and the Holocaust

A transnational education project

The aim of the resources presented here is to help teachers and students embed the experiences of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Europe’s East – especially in Ukraine, Poland, and Romania – into their teaching and learning.

Researchers: Professor Sara Jones (PI), Dr Sarah Hall, Dr Julian Hoerner, Dr Maryna Rusanova, Dr Ewa Tartakowsky, Dr Isabel Wollaston

We launched two competitions associated with the resources, one for students over the age of 16 in secondary-level education in any country, and one for teachers or teachers-in-training in the UK.

  1. Student competition

Students over the age of sixteen in secondary-level education in any country were invited to submit a “creative cartography” based on one or more of the following three events:

  • Massacre at Babyn Yar in 1941
  • Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943
  • Deportations of Jews and Sinti and Roma from Romania

You can find out more about these events, about creative cartography, and about the competition in the short video below (available in English, Romanian, Ukrainian and Polish).

Further information and links to images and testimonies can be found in the teacher resources linked below. We encouraged a creative response to remembrance, rather than creating art as if you have direct experience of the events of the Holocaust and Second World War.

Students could submit their cartography in any medium or language and with it a 200-word explanation of their project in English, Romanian, Ukrainian or Polish.

The competition opened on 19 April 2024 and closed on 27 January 2025. The competition received entries from young people from Poland, Romania and Ukraine. The judges selected one overall winner and three category winners for each historical event.

The winners were:

  • Overall Winner: Kinga Jasnosik
  • Category Winner – Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Antonina Janicka
  • Category Winner – Babyn Yar: Anastasiia Baziulkina, Daria Kovalenko, Vladislav Savenkov
  • Category Winner – Deportations from Romania: Alexandru Ghețu

Explore the winning entries [PDF, 1 MB].

Three further entries were highly commended

  • Alexia Ionescu
  • Zofia Kaczmarek
  • Mihai Oancea and Sara Ciobanu

 

  1. Teacher competition

Teachers or those training to be teachers were invited to submit a short lesson plan based on one of the resources linked below, each of which covers a particular event in Europe’s East during the Second World War. The resources are not intended to be comprehensive, and each includes links to further reading, lesson ideas, images and testimonies. The competition opened on 19 April 2024 and closed on 27 January 2025. The judges selected two winners: Marina Kaplan and Emma Joyce.

The Holocaust in Europe’s East: Teacher Resources

The Second World War in Europe’s East

Acknowledgements

The teacher materials build on the work of four College of Arts and Law Collaborative Research Interns who worked with us in the summer of 2023. Many thanks to Lydia Eedy (Art Created in Labour Camps and Ghettos and Babyn Yar Massacre), Charlotte Grace (Ukrainian Nationalism and the Katyn Massacre), Isabel Locke (Treblinka Uprising and Deportations from Romania), and Marlena Wierzchowska (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). We also benefitted from the invaluable advice of experts at the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, Holocaust Educational Trust, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies “Tkuma”, Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine”, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, and Prof Marek Kucia from the Jagiellonian University and International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. The design work on the videos and resources was completed by Oxana Bischin who also supplied Romanian subtitles and translations.

Please note that many of the images included in the video and linked in the resources were taken by the Nazis and should be approached sensitively.

Our research

The resources presented here build on the research project Antisemitism in Post-Migrant Britain, funded by the College of Arts and Law, the cross-country collaboration Antisemitism and Holocaust Education in Transnational Perspective, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account, and discussions in the COST-funded network on Slow Memory. You can find out more about this work in this video - Antisemitism and Slow Memory.