Holocaust Lesson : Education: In an effort to teach ethnic tolerance, students take roles of prisoners and guards in daylong re-creation of a death camp. But some observers say the exercise trivializes the horror.

A recorded train whistle blew in the Robert Fulton Middle School auditorium foyer Wednesday as a young group of World War II Nazi death camp “prisoners” filed in.

*

Some of the 31 eighth-graders giggled as they were issued color-coded identification tags and serial numbers were “tattooed” on their arms with marking pens by ninth-grade “SS guards.”

Others stared glumly at the ominous surroundings created by Louise Guarella, their English teacher, in her efforts to re-enact the horror of the Holocaust to teach students the importance of ethnic tolerance and empathy, a program that drew criticism from some education thinkers.

“Cool, we get tattoos!” one student exclaimed about the fake markings while shuffling through the processing center of what he was told was the “Notluf Concentration Camp,” which is Fulton spelled backward.

“Please remain quiet,” said Guarella, who with co-coordinator Mary Grunthaner, stood impassive throughout the event in her full black “commandant” uniform of a black turtleneck shirt and black pants. No swastikas were used.

“All females form two lines by colored ID tags and males form another,” Guarella instructed the mostly Latino students.

Guarella, 26, in her first year at Fulton, returned in March from an annual California League of Middle Schools conference in San Diego brimming with ideas. She had heard a variety of presentations in several teaching method workshops at the conference, but one at a Northern California school particularly caught her attention.

“They informed us how they were able to re-enact the Holocaust for a whole day,” Guarella said. “They’d just completed their second year of doing this, using a group of eighth- and ninth-graders.

“The ninth-graders who were this year’s guards were prisoners last year,” she said. “So they got to see both sides of the exercise.”

Guarella thought the program would work well with her eighth-grade honors English students. She contacted Grunthaner, whose ninth-grade world history class was studying World War II, and the two came up with a proposal.

To heighten anxiety, the teachers required students to perform a number of senseless tasks to Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite compositions.

Two chairs stood alone on stage with a “hospital” banner linking them. Students would find themselves randomly selected to sit near that banner as “contaminated prisoners.” Shortly afterward, black circles were stuck to their name tags, signifying that they had been executed because of their weaknesses.

Others were just “executed” at random.

“At Notluf, weakness means death,” Grunthaner announced sternly after each execution, pacing before the students, hands clasped behind her back.

Interspersed were meaningless chores such as picking up loose paper around “barrack” areas and pulling auditorium seats up and down repeatedly.

Lunch consisted of watered-down potato soup, bread and water.

Later, the students watched a video reflecting how susceptible some individuals are toward fascist-like behavior.

Students were asked to write their impressions of the experience.

“I feel like I am not a person anymore,” 13-year-old Chol Kim wrote about his tattoo. “And that my goal in life is to work and die.”

Resenting the authority some of his schoolmates had over him during the event, Chol mocked guards into disciplining him, while his fellow prisoners laughed.

“Go ahead, report me,” he said to Araceli Barba, playing an SS guard.

Araceli led him to what was called the execution area, giggling too.

Members of the Jewish community and some educators were critical of the exercise.

“This cheapens the whole attitude toward the Holocaust,” said Irv Rubin, national chairman of the Jewish Defense League. “How can they duplicate the vulgarity and barbarism of the camps?”

But Shirley Winger of Panorama City, who is Jewish and gave permission for her son, Michael, to participate in the event, said: “This is a great opportunity for my son to become more aware of the evils that exist in the world.

“It’s important for these students to know that something as horrible as the Holocaust can happen to anybody at any time,” she said.

During a class discussion after the event, 14-year-old Maria Castillejo reflected on the horrors of that possibility.

“I was afraid of the SS guards,” she said. “I could barely move, I was trembling so much. Every time I looked at that tattoo, I felt like washing it off.

“I learned what the Jews had to go through,” Maria said.

Times staff writer Abigail Goldman contributed to this story.