PORTAGE, MI -- An English teacher at a Portage middle school wants to teach her students more than spelling and grammar.

She wants to teach compassion.

Johanna Toth is part of a pilot program at Portage Public Schools that aims to teach moral and ethical lessons through personal stories from the Holocaust.

“A teacher’s job is not just to teach content,” Toth said in an interview with MLive. “It’s to cultivate amazing human beings.”

Toth, a teacher at Portage North Middle School, attended the annual Arthur and Rochelle Belfer National Conference for Educators at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. She said it was an effort to learn more about the “complicated history that led up to the Holocaust."

The 7th grade English teacher explained how her first introduction to a survivor of the World War II-era genocide caused her to reevaluate her responsibility as an educator to sculpt the next generation of the country’s citizens.

Her father’s family is Jewish, and though her family is not religious, Toth said that heritage influenced her interest in Anne Frank when she herself was a middle school student.

Now, as she prepares to enter her 24th year as a teacher, Toth’s words got caught in her throat as she recalled first hearing a quote from survivor Haim Ginott that explained the horrors he witnessed.

“I might cry,” Toth said. “It really matters to me.”

Toth recited Ginott’s quote, saying, “My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.

“So, I am suspicious of education,” she said. “My request is this: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”

Lessons from the Holocaust are best taught in English classes, Toth said, because personal stories about the experience better resonate with students than dates, statistics and facts.

“If I can tell one person’s story -- what they went through -- that is something my students can relate to and understand," Toth said.

The memoir, “Somewhere There Is Still A Sun," is written by a Holocaust survivor, Michael Gruenbaum, who was about the same age as Toth’s students when he endured the concentration camps.

The book’s title came from a letter from his mother to relatives during the war, Gruenbaum said in a video shared by the book’s publisher.

“The book talks about that there is still a sun,” Gruenbaum said. “That there’s still hope.”

Gruenbaum was born in 1930 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, according to his author bio. In 1942, he was sent to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, or Terezin, with his mother and sister, and remained there until the end of the war.

Toth can’t explain why, but learning about the Holocaust catches the attention of her students-- and herself-- better than other topics.

“It lights their passion for learning,” she said. “It’s hard to believe that something like (the Holocaust) could happen."

Established in 1993, the Arthur and Rochelle Belfer National Conference for Educators trains educators in teaching the Holocaust to their students.

At the 2019 conference, the group of 260 educators explored best approaches and strategies for teaching about the Holocaust and visited the museum’s latest exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust,” which looks at American society in the 1930s and 40s and the factors that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, according to a press release from the museum.

Toth said as children grow up, they read for pleasure less often, something she hopes to turn around with these personal stories.

Teachers first read and discussed the memoir before it was brought into the classroom, Toth said. This fall will be the second year of reading it with the classes as a pilot book. If teachers would like to make it a permanent part of the curriculum, the district’s curriculum committee will need to approve it, she said.

Toth is not intentionally creating connections between the lessons of the Holocaust and current events in the news, she said. She attempts to keep politics out of her lessons. Toth hopes to instead “connect students to their humanity," she said.

“Not to label people,” Toth said. “To build compassion. Create less fear.”

Toth took a class of her students to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills last year where they met Holocaust survivors and were on the “edge of their seats” listening to the one survivor’s story.

Teaching her students about compassion allows her to build up the next generation of people to be loving, caring, inclusive and hopeful, she said.

It’s about connecting as humans, ignoring the characteristics that divide people, Toth said.

In her 19th year as a teacher in Portage, Toth said she knows that people who disregard young students as simply teenagers don’t see beyond the stereotypes. Rather, young people give her hope for the future of the country, she said.

“The future has to be based on hope and love."