Museum trip caps Holocaust program

Participants of the Adopt-a-Survivor program visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

By: Marisa Maldonado
   HIGHTSTOWN — Esther Clifford signed up for the Adopt-a-Survivor program to help preserve her story of surviving the Holocaust by sharing it with a Hightstown High School student.
   But she found herself with more than one listener at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., during a field trip last week with the program’s participants.
   "I was showing, explaining and translating some of the things," said Ms. Clifford, who was born in Germany and now lives in Monroe. "After awhile I was looking around to see who was listening, and I noticed a whole bunch of people following me. I recognized that they didn’t even belong to us."
   The trip was a culmination for the Adopt-a-Survivor program, which was started this year by the Second Generation Holocaust Education Foundation and funded by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education.
   "The students were able to relate better to the stories they heard from the survivors," said Marianne Meyer, SGHEF director of educational outreach. "They went to this museum, where the artifacts were in their faces."
   The six freshmen at Hightstown High School spent from October to May chronicling the experiences of their survivors. In return, the students promised to tell the story of their survivor publicly in 2045 — the 100th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust.
   "It seems so long from now," said Amanda Rod, one of the student participants, who will be 55 when she tells the story. "Your parents are in your 40s, so you’ll be even older than your parents. You just hope you’ll tell his story and give justice to what an amazing person he was."
   Amanda and the other students discussed a different part of the survivor’s experience each time they met, from their childhood to their countries’ takeover by the Nazis to their time in concentration camps.
   Alex Schechter, a freshman at HHS, said he knew what to expect when talking to his survivor but still found the experience hard to describe.
   "It was pretty graphic and a little overwhelming," Alex said.
   Words weren’t the only form of education in the program. Amanda said her survivor, Sol Lurie, brought her books about the Holocaust that included aspects of his story, such as the ghetto where he lived.
   "It’s like a firsthand story about history, and you learn so much more right from him," Amanda said. "You get emotion with it."
   Amanda said she hopes to keep in touch with Mr. Lurie, who already has invited her and her partner on the project to swim at his community pool over the summer.
   "It’s like he’s our grandfather," he said.
   Listening to the stories touched the students — but the trip to the museum was what tied all the pieces of those stories together for many of them.
   The students and survivors spent five hours watching videos and viewing exhibits — one student found in a display the town in which her survivor had lived, Ms. Meyer said.
   For Ms. Clifford, who was forced out of her home in Germany at age 17 and deported to Poland, the trip to the museum was a chance to bring history to life for the students.
   "Everything reminded me of what we went through," said Ms. Clifford, who lost her parents and four of six siblings in the Holocaust. "It’s very hard to see, especially when you lost family members."
   The students said they appreciated finding out more about the Holocaust from people who had lived through it. For Amanda, the most memorable exhibit was a room filled with shoes — each one belonging to a victim of the Holocaust.
   "There’s numbers, but you don’t know what that means until you see something you can relate to," Amanda said.
   Alex, who is Jewish, said the entire experience made him realize that his fate would have been the same as any other Jew in Nazi Europe.
   "If I were really there in Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s, with a last name like Schechter, it wouldn’t have been so good for me," he said. "You never know when something like that is going to happen."
   The Hightstown students were joined on the trip by participants from the Ewing High School Adopt-a-Survivor program — and, in Ms. Clifford’s case, by students they didn’t even know.
   Ms. Clifford embraced the many museum-goers who followed her, even calling on them to perform a task. She read names to the students and asked them to find them in books that included the names of people who died in the Holocaust.
   She only told them later that every name she read — and the students found — belonged to a family member or friend.
   Ms. Clifford, who said she hopes to participate in future Adopt-a-Survivor programs, does not want them to forget those names.
   "To know the knowledge of this history will never be forgotten is very important to the survivors," she said. "This is why I like this program. It will remind others what has happened and might prevent something, God forbid, that might start again in the future."