BY DAVE BENJAMIN
Staff Writer
Howell High School students who participated in a year-long project that brought them face-to-face with survivors of the Holocaust will long remember those survivors and the 60-year-old stories they told.
The successful project came to an end recently with a visit to the school from Paul B. Winkler, executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education. The commission provides assistance and advice on the implementation of Holocaust/genocide education in the state’s public schools.
Winkler commended the students and their teachers for a job well done
“If we could bottle what is in this room today there would be peace in the world. What you students and staff here, all of you together, have accomplished would provide us with a world where we would not have to have this kind of program,” he said. “I don’t know how you’re feeling, but I am very choked up.”
Winkler said the commission decided about a year ago to initiate projects in which students and Holocaust survivors would come together.
“As the 60th anniversary (of the end of World War II) approached this year, we thought we needed to have projects and programs where students years from now [would remember],” Winkler said. “There is no doubt in my mind that [the survivors] will forget our names, even the school they were in, but they will never forget this experience.”
Guests at the culminating event of the Howell High School “Portraits of Survivors” project included Paul B. Winkler (above), executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and Gerard Blumenthal (top left), one of the survivors whose portrait was drawn by a student. In a three-part lesson which began early in the 2004-05 school year, nearly 80 Howell art and history students set out to capture the stories and portraits of about 20 Holocaust survivors in a joint venture, “Portraits of Survivors,” with the Center for Holocaust Studies at Brookdale Community College and the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education.
PHOTOS BY DAVE BENJAMIN Winkler attributed the success of the program to many individuals, students, staff and survivors, but said it was a phone call from art teacher Dorene Schwartz-Weitz that sparked the initial response to the project.
“Ms. Weitz had the idea to draw pictures in her class and present them,” Winkler said. “The commission gets excited. We go to the principal, who said, ‘Let’s make this a meaningful experience for our students for their lifetime.’ You have done that, and I thank you.”
DAVE BENJAMIN Holocaust survivors who participated in a special Howell High School project light a candle in memory of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Winkler said the pictures and writings that were created by the students are terrific. A movie describing the project and the pages of the lives of the survivors, all made by the students, will remain forever.
Winkler praised the documentary video and noted that three Howell students, Allison Arolla, Rebecca Suzan and Kellye Chambers, who entered it in a contest at the Center for Holocaust Studies at Brookdale Community College were first-place winners.
“There is only one commitment that [the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education] must have,” Winkler told the survivors who were present. “We must continue to tell the story to honor you. Honor what you have always told me. It’s not so much for the past. It’s for the future.”
In comments to the students, Winkler said, “We have not done a very good job preventing hatred, bias and bigotry. We have not provided to you a world that is free of prejudice and intolerance. By your involvement and desire to be involved in a project like this and by our wonderful survivors’ willingness to share from their inside, I believe so deep inside that it will be you that makes the better world for your students, your children and your grand-children. We need to work on this. We need [to make] the phone call.”
Winkler said the “Portraits of Survivors” project will be replicated in other schools and “will be a model for New Jersey, the country and the world.”
Howell Principal Zina Duerbig said, “World War II is long over. Sixty years ago the systematic murder of six million Jews [came to an end], but the reverberations continue to this day. We must learn and teach our future generations the words ‘Never Again.’ ”
Duerbig expressed her gratitude to the survivors who shared their stories and showed the students “the victory of human spirit.”
The principal credited Howell social studies supervisor Stanley Koba, who provided the students with a short course about the Holocaust, supervisor of English Daniel Green, English teacher Carla Lounsbury and Schwartz-Weitz for their assistance in organizing the program and working with the students.
Schwartz-Weitz then related her own experience as a child growing up in a family of survivors who had lived in bunkers.
“My cousin was born in a bunker,” she said. “I was raised with a victim’s mentality the whole time.”
Schwartz-Weitz said she attended a yeshiva where most of the teachers had numbers on their arms indicating that they had been taken by the Nazis. She said her mother’s friends all had similar numbers on their arms.
Years later Schwartz-Weitz became an art teacher, involved with portrait drawing, and like many art teachers, she needed models for her students. So she went to senior citizens centers.
“I watched my college students sit for hours with the seniors,” she said.
A few years later she discussed, with Winkler, what could be done to bring high school students together with older people.
Coincidentally, during that same time, Schwartz-Weitz’s uncle, a Holocaust survivor, died without ever telling his story.
“The day that I was supposed to draw his portrait my cousin called and said [my uncle] had died that morning,” said Schwartz-Weitz. “I said if I don’t call Dr. Winkler and get this project off the ground … [and so] I presented the project.”