By Jeroen Reuven Bours
Play For Your Life – The Story of Louis Bannet. A book that makes teaching the Holocaust and its anti-hate lessons easier for middle and high school teachers.
The book Play For Your Life - the story of Louis Bannet, educates young middle or high school students to recognize the signs of hate. Through the remarkable story of Louis Bannet, a Holocaust survivor, students are taught the results of hatred and extremism.
Hate crimes are on the rise in America.
Hate often starts with antisemitism and opens the door to other anti-minority bigotry. High school students are especially susceptible to negative peer pressure that often influences kids to become prejudiced.
Holocaust studies - which address these issues are only partially required in the US. Faculties often have little or no guidance on teaching the subject.
This is where the book Play For Your Life comes in. It is specially written for students with short present-tense sentences to move a young reader along. It’s the story of one individual, Louis Bannet, from Rotterdam, Holland. He learns to play the violin and trumpet and ends up playing for his life in order to survive The Holocaust.
The book is divided into three parts, and pauses after each to allow for discussions and workshops. This makes it easy for a teacher to responsibly teach about not only The Holocaust but also the historical markings of rising hate.
Presently this book is in beta form and self-published.
We are in Phase One. We are in the process of getting commentary and suggestions from museum directors, historians, principals, and teachers.
Phase Two will incorporate suggestions into the book and begin the distribution of the book among school districts and individual schools.
A copy can be sent to those who teach history and humanities and want to include Holocaust and anti-hate studies in their curriculum.
Jeroen Reuven Bours resides in New York. He’s American, Israeli, and Dutch and founded Darling, a brand, design, and marketing agency, after working for major US ad agencies. He befriended Louis Bannet during the making of a TV spot for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown NYC. This is Jeroen’s first book written and designed for students, which took 10 years to research and complete.
About the author:
NBC News First 50 State-wide Holocaust survey / Kit Ramgopal – 9/16/2020
A nationwide survey released Wednesday shows a “worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge” among adults under 40, including over 1 in 10 respondents who did not recall ever having heard the word “Holocaust” before.
The survey, touted as the first 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z, showed that many respondents were unclear about the basic facts of the genocide. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. Over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos were established during World War II, but nearly half of U.S. respondents could not name a single one.
“When you learn the history of the Holocaust, you are not simply learning about the past – these lessons remain relevant today in order to understand not only antisemitism, but also all the other ‘isms’ of society. There is real danger to letting them fade.” (Deborah Lipstadt, Ambassador - State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat antisemitism)
