Students in my class and Melanie Shaul’s class in Hadera, Israel, read the autobiography of Dr. Richard Bugajer, My Shadowlife. Melanie and I met his widow in Vienna, on a Centropa summer trip, where we designed this project. Each class read the entire book and then made PowerPoint presentations about each chapter – and then sent their presentations to each other to see how students in another country would understand the same story.

Using the Centropa film "Max Uri -Looking for Frieda", which is a touching love story, together with Emily Dickinson's poem "I Held a Jewel", you can expose your students to learning history, poetry and culture.Through an individual life story of a couple falling in love and then being separated by the war, your students will experience and learn about Jewish life in Vienna prior to WWII.

The poem is used as an analogy to love, or to what is meaningful in life .