Hello and welcome! Today’s post is about our most recent project about the Second World War. We were instructed to create a podcast episode answering the question, “How might we use stories to show the causes and consequences of World War Two?” This question immediately caught my attention as I remembered the stories my Grandfather told me when I was a kid, from the beginning of his life right after the war ended. 

The biggest thing this project brought to the front of my mind is how horrific war is. The absence of mercy and genuine fear that the war involved broke my heart to think about. This project gave me a new outlook on how I view World War Two by showing me the consequences of all the activities that occurred. Watching part of “Saving Private Ryan” in class, was eye opening. The way the German soldiers showed no empathy and poured bullets into the Allied fighters literally made me feel ill. It was so horrifying to see the raw truth of what happened in the war, especially on D-Day.

I think that the more more logistical elements of the project also opened my eyes, but in very different ways. The interview aspect is always difficult, but this time, the interviewee had a much more prominent role in our episodes. They were the storyteller, and their story would guide our episode. We were just there to add context and do the technical stuff, like the mixing and adding music.

My original idea was to speak to a museum and ask them about any traditions they knew of during the war, and get them to tell the story of that. But much like events during the war, things went off the plan. None of the museums I reached out to were willing to speak to me. While this isn’t a direct quote, I took their resounding silence as a no. Using the global collaborator competency, I reached out to many different potential sources, but I suppose my emails and phone calls need more work. Anyways, I took this challenge for what it was, a challenge, and tried to find solutions.

This lead me to rack my brain to find another source. Then, miraculously, I thought back to when I was a kid, and the stories my Mum and Grandfather used to tell me about my Grandpa’s childhood, and his Dad’s adventures in World War Two. I knew as soon as I thought of it, that this was the story I wanted to tell. Although I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t learn a new story from outside of my family, I was excited to learn more about my family history and tell a really cool story. 

As I mentioned before, our driving question is “How might we use stories to show the causes and consequences of World War Two?” My podcast answered this episode to the best of my abilities. The way I did this was by telling the story of my Great-Grandad. He was an Estonian, turned Russian, turned German soldier, and he fought as an officer and a lieutenant in World War Two, fresh out of Estonian military school. He was eventually captured and taken to a German POW camp, where after about a year, he became a German soldier. He lost about 10kg of weight, and after the war started turning against the Germans, him and his wife, got the heck out of Germany, and ended up in Belgium where my Grandfather was born! 

The Germans and the Russians destroyed Estonia, and it lead Estonian and other European peoples to flee to more safe places. Like Canada! Thunder Bay Ontario is where him and his family moved to, and spent the best part of their years there. My Grandpa’s Parents always hoped to return to Estonia, but the Soviet Union had a death grip on the country until 1991. It would have been a suicide mission moving back. 

My research was something I was really proud of. It took me a while to get to the point of satisfaction but the revised version of my research was something I’m proud to say I created. I think I went deep into what I wanted to portray in my episode. I used images to show what Estonia looked like before, and after the war. As Ms. Willemse once said, “ The difference between an A and an A+ is sophistication.” I think my research was well done, and sophisticated. This definitely showed how I used the competency of using evidence and resources. I found a variety of different sources and evaluated them to see how accurate and prevalent they were.  

Watching a video at the end of this project was the final straw in analyzing cause and consequence. It’s called The Fallen of World War Two, and it uses statistics to show the consequences of the war on civilians and soldiers. 70 million people died. I had not realized the absolute scope of World War Two. Having a chance to analyze the causes and consequences showed me that the war impacted everyone in some way. Soldiers, civilians, family, and friends were all impacted by the consequences of the war.

Something I identified during the project was my own individual bias against German people. I know that this bias is formed from ignorance. This project has given me insight into where it came from and how to evolve this intolerant mindset. As I lived in Switzerland for a year, when looking out over the landscape I often found myself associating Germany with Hitler’s Nazi party. Listening to stories from this project, I found this bias falling away, and having to accost it as hard as I could. It took hard work, but I now have incredible amounts of sympathy and guilt for the German people. 

Weekly, we participated in text discussions. This was a bit difficult at the beginning. I found my groups speeding through our worksheets and not having meaningful discussions. This got better as the second week came around, but our discussions seemed to not provoke any further questions or feelings. We talked as a group about what we wanted to improve on at the end of our discussion, and week three was a definite success. This gave me an opportunity to work on my leadership skills, and use the responding to text competency by filling out the “power sheet”

After a project, I’m often left with new questions. This project left me with two major ones. What could I have done better? And, How might I have used my story to connect with my audience in a more meaningful way? 

After thinking about these in depth, I’ve reached some vague conclusions. I say vague because I could most likely go on forever with ways to make this project better, but the aim for me is to describe the developments I can work on for the next project. Immediately, emailing my interview candidates as soon as possible, and with more effective language. Getting the interviewee excited to be a part of this project, instead of doing a puny grade ten kid a favour.

Connecting to my audience would require using more emotional language and giving more background information. I’m happy with how I did this in my current project, using the materials I had. If I probed my interviewee deeper by asking questions that would provoke more emotional answers, I would be able to form a deeper connection with my audience. Also showing more context would prove to my audience that these events had real consequences. 

Some of the go deeper assignments definitely caught my eye during this project. There was one story, which was a first hand account from a German man named Helmut Lemke. This story was the first experience I had this year where the impacts of the war on individuals was truly brought to life. His story showed me that the Germans had no respect for their own citizens. Although one of Hitler’s goals was to guarantee “living room” for the German people, his government didn’t really care about their own civilians. He only cared about German domination. 

This year, with our new grading system, I’ve been working to achieve my contract. I contracted for a 93% and I think throughout this project, I’ve proved that I’ve achieved that. I have worked as hard to make everything I created as sophisticated as possible. I took in mind all the core competencies and used them to make my project the best I believe it can be. 

Thank you for reading today’s post and make sure to check out my latest podcast episode, available on most streaming platforms now. I’m really happy with how this episode turned out, and I hope you enjoy. See you soon!

-Zo