Eighth graders at Washingtonville were immersed in Holocaust curriculum.

The auditorium of eighth graders sat, transfixed by every sentence that came from the octogenarian’s voice that morning, without any need for a teacher to prompt them to be quiet. Gently, matter of factly, the speaker condensed his childhood to fit within an hour.

A childhood of being placed on a Kindertransport train, alone, sent away from his family in Germany, feeling the heat from the bonfires of banned books, hearing the shattered glass of the Kristallnacht, and watching a townperson degraded and ridiculed for not voting for Hitler. He recited an anti-Semitic song the neighborhood children liked to sing. He saw the coffee shop completely destroyed, with “cakes and smashed eggs laying all over.”

Werner Neuburger gripped his young audience with how he stayed with a kind family of strangers in England, not knowing whether he would ever see his mother again, and how he was eventually able to come to America. Here, as a teenager, with the war still going strong, he joined the U.S. army and fought for his new country.

For two entire school days in late April, the classroom bells were suspended and the regular schedule put on hold as 400 eighth graders in Washingtonville Middle School went beyond the text of books, numbers and facts, and grainy black and white war footage. They heard stories from the people who lived through the Holocaust, such as Neuberger, of West Nyack, as well as the now-elderly camp survivors, hidden children, and camp liberators. They acquired a small taste of the fear and helplessness the victims in Europe felt during those difficult World War II years through many first-hand lessons, as well.

The annual event was sponsored by the Holocaust Museum and Study Center of Spring Valley, and was coordinated by Lisa Stenchever, the educational director, and Rebecca Wetzel, a social studies teacher in the school. It was Wetzel who brainstormed the idea of bringing the museum to the school after students visited the museum five years ago.
The field trip was a success, she noted, but only one-fourth of the graduating class was able to attend as the museum is very small. Wetzel thought the experience was too valuable, and contacted Stenchever to see if some of the programs, as well as speakers, could be brought to the school instead so that everyone could take advantage of it.

And since it began, the program has made such an impact, Wetzel said, that when the high schoolers are questioned what they remember most about middle school, 99 percent mention it first.

“This is the last generation to hear what happened first-hand from the people who experienced it,” said Wetzel, who was honored by the museum last fall.

Since starting at Washingtonville, it has been presented annually in Cornwall Middle School in Cornwall, N.Y., which had their turn in March, and River Dell Middle School in Riveredge, N.J., scheduled for June. Suffern Middle School had a version of the all-day program for the first time in March.

“We wanted it due to a rise in biased language, and we wanted the kids to learn where the biased language can ultimate lead to,” said Brian Fox, principal of Suffern Middle School. “To hear the survivors talk, and the personalization of the programs, those are the most important things. There was one gentleman who gave a compelling talk and the kids were absolutely riveted. It absolutely had an impact on them.”

Assistant Principal Michael Giorgo of River Dell Middle School said that they are honored to have the survivors and the museum volunteers back for the third year on June 2.
“These are the people that lived it. This is the real deal. It was a very powerful program,” he said. River Dell takes it a step further and asks the students to don a badge that the discriminated groups wore, whether a yellow star (Jew), red triangle (political prisoner) green triangle (criminal) blue triangle (foreign forced laborer) pink (homosexual) purple (Jehovah’s witness) brown (gypsy) or black (asocial elements).

Lauren Colletti, an eighth grade English teacher who coordinates the program at River Dell, said the workshops and speakers they had in the two years previous were “life changing.”

“I ask them to write down their reflections after the program and some kids mentioned it was life changing. It is one thing to read about or to talk about, to hear it from the lips of survivors, that is life-changing.”

The number of schools that can participate in the program has to be limited, Stenchever explained, because of the enormous juggling act of coordinating skilled volunteers, who are mostly experienced, long time, retired teachers, and survivors for the commitment. They have to be planned at least one year in advance. Also, many of the survivors are reaching their late golden years and need transportation and help to get to the destination.
Washingtonville Middle School is a large brick school nestled in a mostly Christian small town in Orange County. The town was named after George Washington around the time he was president, and, with its quaint tiny shops and colonial homes, probably hasn’t changed dramatically since that time.

Students listen to a recreation of hidden Jews living under floorboards.

To an uninformed visitor walking in to the school’s hallway in late April, when the museum program took place, being greeted by bold Nazi symbols would be a shock at first. A closer look at the hand-drawn posters and computer print-outs turn out to be anti-propaganda. The posters are, in themselves, a comprehensive lesson on the Holocaust after Hitler’s rise to power in 1934, just two years after the school building itself was built. The posters made as part of the regular curriculum show not only the fate of the six million Jews, but others such as homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies (Roma) and thousands of Catholic priests.

How the Holocaust Museum and Study Center’s program enhances the already in-depth curriculum, Stenchever noted, is that not only do the survivors speak, but the children also are able to “experience” what it was like, turning the dry statistics from long ago into real people, real situations. One classroom is set aside to recreate the fear an actual family felt while hiding under the floorboards of a home (this is done through headsets, listening to a recording of voices recreating what happened). This leads to a discussion of the righteous people who were not under threat, but who chose to put their lives on the line to rescue others. Yet another classroom is set up for building the personalities and descriptions of Holocaust victims.

The program has been so popular, it has been opened up to the public on the second day, with an evening presentation. This year’s speaker was Sam Bradin, an Auschwitz survivor who did a question and answer session with the audience.

“We were there for a long time so people asking so many questions,” Stenchever said. “It made a wonderful impact and nothing can replace it. You can never replace these survivors and the hidden children answering questions.”

“It can happen to anyone and it can happen to anybody. It continues to repeat itself until some generation puts a stop to it,” Stenchever said. “Through this program, things like the hiding, they become part of it,” she said.

During the day, in a classroom Irit Bloomgarden, a retired teacher and Holocaust center volunteer, divided about 20 eighth-graders into small groups around their own table. Each group was given a set of cards each listing the name of real family members who lived during World War II in Europe; one group got, for instance, a card listed the “Nordau family of France” and the names of the three sisters and two brothers.

On the chalkboard, under “professions” Bloomgarden wrote such descriptions as doctor, lawyer, teacher, artist, butcher, journalist, judge, historian; under “distinguishing characteristics” short, tall, blind, hair color, athletic; under “hobbies and talents” soccer, learning, musical instrument, singing, dolls, knitting, swimming, After the students “fleshed out” the characters with the descriptions, the cards were handed back to the volunteer, who then redistributed two-thirds back to the students in a random manner.

“We are trying to take a statistic, six million, and trying to personalize it,” she said. “Six million is a cold statistic.

“With some groups, entire families survived, others were not so lucky,” she said, as she handed back some of the cards to the students, who quickly learned who lived and who did not. One table had one family member return out of five, and at another table three out of seven family members returned.

“How old was the survivor?” Bloomgarden asked, to the table with one card returned. “Three years old,” the student responded.

“Who did not make it?”

“The 36-year old father, from Italy, he was a barber, and Caroline, a black-haired, blue-eyed 16-year-old daughter who liked to run,” the student responded.

“It is difficult to put ourselves back to 70 years ago, and with names that we can’t pronounce clearly,” she said. “But the point is, just because these things happened so long ago doesn’t mean it’s any less real. Tragedies that happen, we ask, what do we have in common with Darfur, a different culture with different names and different everything?”
“They’re not that different than you,” she said. “It was a different time and place, but the same people.”

Meanwhile, in an adjacent class, volunteer Gerri Loeb discussed the hidden families of the war, and the brave gentile families that hid them. She asked the students what they would do in certain situations, each relating to rescuing someone while putting their own life in danger. She then discussed what actually took place in real life, and the real outcomes of each story. For instance, Johannes Theodore Woortman “gradually spirited children to the countryside to find people who were willing to hide them” and was able to save 300 children. Loeb said about 21,000 people helped Jews survive, many who sacrificed their own lives to do so, such as Woortman, who was killed by the Nazis.

To cap off Loeb’s lesson, each student donned a headphone with a recreation of the conversations that took place by a Jewish family that hid under the kitchen floorboards in a farmhouse of a Polish family, and the fear they felt when the Nazi footsteps and voices were above them.