Students get visual take on Holocaust through classroom museum

It is likely what a Jewish captive would have seen and heard in Auschwitz, and it is what Las Vegas High School history teacher Dan Robinson tried to replicate for his students. Robinson not only wants his kids to learn about the Holocaust, he wants them to experience it as closely as is possible at school.

For one day every year, Robinson and his students transform a classroom at the school at 6500 E. Sahara Ave. into a Holocaust museum. Images of train cars line the walls to the entrance of the room. Around the room are painted barbed wire, murals of burnt bodies, Nazi uniforms, shoes, teeth, luggage on the ground and nooses hang from the ceiling. There are skeletal remains popping out of an oven. Adolf Hitler is projected against a wall giving one of his inciting speeches. Other TVs in the room play videos with graphic footage.

“All history is important,” said Robinson, “but World War II is such a pivotal moment in history.”

Robinson is dressed, head to toe, in a striped uniform befitting a prisoner in a concentration camp.

“Those events and that time period created our world today,” he said. “It has to be remembered … I’m just trying to pass on my passion of history to the kids.

“If you can affect this,” Robinson said, tapping his chest, then his head, “you’ll never forget in here.”

A day earlier, Las Vegas resident and Holocaust survivor Stephen Nasser visited the school to tell his story to a theater full of students.

At the museum the following day, Nasser was selling his book, “My Brother’s Voice,” signing autographs and taking photos with students. The school presented Nasser and his wife with honorary diplomas, too.

Robinson started a smaller version of the museum in his classroom four years ago. It has grown every year since, with students helping to add to the collection of artifacts and decorations.

The costumes scattered throughout the museum are ones that Robinson wears in class when he is teaching lessons.

Robinson is known around the school for his methods. Melanie Bernhard, a security officer at the school, is one of his biggest fans.

“I wish there were more teachers like him when I was in high school,” Bernhard said. “I try to make a point of going into his classroom at least once a month to see what he’s teaching that week. He becomes what he teaches. I mean, look at him. I’m 62 years old … but Dan Robinson actually makes me miss being a student.”

Robinson plans to expand the museum in the coming years and be able to let every student experience it. He also would like to be able to open it to the public.

Sophomore Elizabeth Arroyo said that she, like many students in the audience, cried during Nasser’s story. His first-person account of the Holocaust coupled with the museum made a big impact on her, she said.

“The pictures were sad and they really upset me,” Arroyo said of the photos of dead bodies in the museum’s simulated gas chamber. “But it’s nice to know how things actually happened. It goes more into detail about certain things. It gives us more perspective.

“It inspired me to stop complaining about the little things.”

Contact View education reporter Jeff Mosier at jmosier@viewnews.com or 224-5524.