Photographs posted in Leigh Ann Totty’s Bethel Park High School classroom portray some of her travel destinations in Europe.
Among them is Terezín, a small Czech Republic town about 50 miles north of the capital city, Prague, and once was home to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, a Nazi transit hub for deporting Jewish people to concentration camps and killing centers.
“That was really an eye-opening experience for me to realize what I had not studied or learned,” Totty said.
The visit helped prompt her to delve deeply into the study of the Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust that claimed 6 million lives during World War II. She subsequently made trips to other Third Reich-related sites, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland, taking pictures that now adorn her walls.
“I always wanted to be a lifelong learner, and this gives me the chance to explore that in some ways and hopefully create a better world,” she said.
Totty incorporates lessons on the Holocaust into her English language arts classes for 10th-grade students, teenagers who were born in the neighborhood of 65 years after the Nazis’ defeat. Nevertheless, she finds that they continue to have an interest in one of the darker chapters of human history.
And she guides them accordingly.
“I talk to them about being careful of the historical fiction world of novels and books. There is so much that is set in that World War II time period,” she said, while her goal is “getting kids to go back and realize that the real stories are just as fascinating, if not more so.”
In January, Totty was among a select group of 23 educators and Holocaust center staff members to participate in the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous’ 2026 Advanced Seminar. She previously attended the JFR Summer Institute for Teachers as part of her two-plus decades of expanding her knowledge about the Shoah.
A focus of this year’s event was on the wealth of resources available to present survivors’ stories in relatable ways for students, such as video recordings that can be obtained through entities such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Some feature the late Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel, who serves as a primary subject for Totty’s lessons. Her students read Wiesel’s 1960 novel “Night,” a literary examination of his time at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps, and listen to recordings of him speaking about his experiences.
“Hearing that, they do say, influences their understanding of the subject,” she said.
Students also read “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by cartoonist Art Spiegelman depicting him interviewing his Holocaust-survivor father. Spiegelman, who was born three years after World War II’s conclusion, portrays his parents as mice and Nazis as cats.
“I think we get a larger perspective because that book is set in the ’70s and early ’80s, when Spiegelman was doing the interviews. We’re taken back where he has to come to realize what’s been lost,” with regard to his relatives, Totty said. “His mother’s family and his father’s family were both large, dynamic families.”
Both writers are subjects of recent documentaries that students can view: “Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire,” a comprehensive biography released in 2024, and last year’s PBS American Masters presentation “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse.”
In 2017, Totty arranged through the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Classrooms Without Borders program to bring 89-year-old Howard Chandler to speak at Bethel Park High School. He spoke about growing up in Poland before the 1939 German invasion and memories of seeing family members “marched down to a waiting train – including my mother, my sister and my younger brother – taken away, never to be seen or heard of again.”
As for the opportunity to attend a survivor’s presentation in person, Classrooms Without Borders board member Hilary Tyson told the Bethel Park students at the time:
“You are the last generation to actually bear witness and hear the story.”
Although the passage of time prevents today’s students from experiencing something similar, those in Totty’s classes can draw inspiration by reading Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which includes a statement about oppressed people:
“What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”
From Totty’s perspective, the long-standing assignment has its desired effect.
“Some former students have come back and said, ‘I learned so much from you bringing this up in class.’ And that’s been very validating.”