Local exhibit uses familiar story to teach about genocide’s horrors
By: Emily Craighead
Growing up in suburban New Jersey, it is difficult to imagine the terror of being a Jewish child in Vienna or Budapest during World War II, much less the plight of a child in Darfur where 200,000 people have been killed and 2 million have been driven from their homes.
"If you just give them statistics, it doesn’t mean anything," said Saul Goldwasser, a professor at Mercer County Community College. "If they hear the individual stories, they can see the intolerance."
Through a temporary exhibit on Anne Frank at Chestnut Tree Books in the Princeton Shopping Center, Mr. Goldwasser hopes to instill a greater understanding of the tragedy of genocide in the 1,200 students expected to visit the exhibit this month.
The exhibit is sponsored by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, the Mercer County Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center at Mercer County Community College, the Julius and Dorothy Koppelman Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center at Rider University, and the Mercer County Education Association.
Students from Millstone River School in Plainsboro who attended the exhibit Wednesday heard stories from Holocaust survivors. They also visited "Anne Frank: A History for Today," a series of panels juxtaposing photographs of the Frank family with those of historical events of the time, showing how political decisions affected families like the Franks. The third component of the visit included watching a short film about Anne Frank.
The exhibit also features a section on Darfur and teachers receive lesson plans and information on this present-day genocide.
Princeton resident Martha Kingsley was one of the Holocaust survivors who shared her story with the students.
An only child growing up in Vienna, she attended the city’s only Jewish school. As the Nazi party’s influence grew, restrictions on what Jews could do and where they could go increased. Ms. Kingsley’s father escaped to Palestine and her mother, a seamstress, went to work as a housekeeper. Ms. Kingsley was sent to live with relatives in New York City.
"My life was interrupted at the age of 13, but it could have been a lot worse," Ms. Kingsley told the students.
Ivan Becker and his family, who lived in Budapest during the war, were not as lucky.
"By the time I was 15, I was alone," Mr. Becker said.
Twice, his father was sent to forced-labor camps, and Mr. Becker discovered years later that his father perished in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Mr. Becker was separated from his mother after a seven-day death march and never heard from her again.
Mr. Becker, who lives in Princeton now, credits Raoul Wallenberg with saving his life. Mr. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is said to have saved thousands of Jews by issuing them Swedish passports identifying them as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation.
"Wallenberg was what we call one of the ‘Righteous People,’" Mr. Becker said.
He encouraged the Millstone River students to emulate Mr. Wallenberg in their own lives.
"If you can stand up for somebody in school who is being taunted, then you become one of the righteous," he told them.
The Anne Frank exhibit will be on display at Chestnut Tree Books through June 3. The bookstore is open from 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.