Stephen F. Austin State University

A Stephen F. Austin State University student was among 20 students selected from universities in Texas to attend a conference designed to help future educators learn how to teach students about one of grimmest times in history.

The nationally acclaimed Warren Fellowship for Future Teachers at Holocaust Museum Houston provides intensive training and opportunities to hear from international experts on World War II history and survivors of the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust. Shannon T. O'Brien of Nacogdoches was selected based on an application process that included an essay about the importance of teaching the dangers of intolerance, prejudice and hatred to today's students. O'Brien graduated from Nacogdoches High School and earned a Bachelor's in English from SFA. She is currently completing the teaching certification program at SFA.

Although her prior study of the Holocaust had been limited to reading "The Diary of Anne Frank," O'Brien was interested in the fellowship because she felt it would make her a better teacher. "When I was in high school, the study was less in depth," she said. "They focused on the date, but for me, the focus has changed. I came home with a renewed sense of humanity and hope that we can teach our students to live in a global community where they don't have to stand by and watch or ignore horrific events, but that they have the power to do something, whether it be to stop violence and bullying on their own schools or protest.

Internationally recognized Holocaust experts who addressed the group included Dr. Benjamin Ferencz, who at age 27 served as chief prosecutor at one of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where he convicted 22 leading Nazis of murdering more than a million people; Dr. Bryan Mark Rigg of the American Military University and Southern Methodist University and author of the book "Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe;" Dr. William Meinecke, a scholar with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; and Orit Margaliot of Yad Vashem in Israel.

The students also took a field trip to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to hear Ferencz speak on "Protecting Human Rights through Law." The fellows, who will become elementary or secondary school teachers, also met in small groups with Houston-area survivors of the Holocaust to hear their experiences first-hand. O'Brien said hearing the survivors' first-hand accounts of the event made it much more real to her. "We are desensitized to these deaths," she said. "Hearing the survivors' testimony made it more real. They are still living with it today. It made all of us more human."

O'Brien said that even though she wanted to attend the conference, it was an upsetting experience. "The discussions we had about children being taken from their homes were painful," she said. "They told mothers to give infants to their grandparents because the mothers were going to the gas chambers. Seeing the emotion in their faces was so upsetting." O'Brien intends to teach high school English after finishing her certification classes and also hopes to teach cultural anthropology classes in the future after completing her master's degree in cultural anthropology through the University of Denver.

Other fellowship recipients were from Baylor University, Schreiner University, Texas A&M University at Texarkana, and University of Texas campuses at Austin, Arlington, El Paso and San Antonio. Professors from three universities in the People's Republic of China attended the 2006 conference to study the program - and potentially replicate it in their own country. "Because of its previous history as a nation closed to the outside world, many Chinese educators and their students have very little knowledge about the full scope of the Holocaust," said Susan Myers, executive director of the Museum. "Many are aware of the invasion of the Chinese mainland, but they are largely unfamiliar with what occurred in Europe and the lessons to be learned from those events." Myers said the visit marks the first time that educators from China have traveled to the United States as an organized group to learn how to teach the Holocaust to future generations in that country. The goal is that the Chinese professors will return to their country and establish an extension of the Warren Fellowship there, she said. Professors Lihong Song of the Department of Religious Studies at Nanjing University, Qianhong Zhang of the College of History and Culture at Henan University and Jianxin Hou from Tianjin Normal University in China were among 30 university faculty members who attended the event.

The Warren Fellowship was developed by Holocaust Museum Houston with funding from survivor Naomi Warren and her family, through the Warren Fellowship Fund, to educate future teachers on strategies and approaches for bringing Holocaust education into the classroom. Additional sponsors of this year's program include the task force and the Solomon Spector Foundation of Syracuse, New York.

Holocaust Museum Houston promotes awareness and educates the public of the dangers of prejudice, hatred and violence against the backdrop of the Holocaust by fostering remembrance, understanding and education. The Museum is free and open to the public. For more information about Holocaust Museum Houston, call (713) 942-8000 or visit www.hmh.org.