The Note

A story of kindness and resilience from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

A lesson plan and teaching resources for Key Stage 3 students.

Lesson plans, presentations and source books for this resource can be downloaded using the links below.

About: A local story with international impact

This lesson aims to approach the story of the Holocaust by focusing on an individual story of two people, caught up in the events surrounding the liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. It begins with the examination of an object which might at first glance be a familiar element of the lives of all young people: a note.

Every object can be used to tell a story. Every piece of paper can help us to understand the history of another person or another time. By starting with students’ experiences of notes, we ground them in their own experience and lead them to think about their own contexts.

What might happen in the future to make their notes a valuable source of information to others?
By beginning with their experience of the use of notes, students are drawn to a note which changed lives, a response of one Oxfordshire soldier to the atrocities witnessed at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The experiences of camp survivor Naomi Kaplan (married name, Naomi Warren) and the soldier, Arthur Tyler, open the way to thinking about fundamental questions raised by the Holocaust, while acknowledging the power of acts of kindness in the face of inhumanity.

This lesson is not intended as an introduction to the Holocaust. Students encountering the story of Arthur and Naomi should have completed a unit on the events surrounding this aspect of history. Instead, this resource offers students a way to respond to what they have learned, and to realise the power of one human act of kindness amid inhumanity.

It deepens students’ historical understanding and encourages them to arrive at their own questions about the past to begin to make sense of what they have learned.