9th graders digitally meet with two Holocaust survivors

This year, the school library and Bill Brown have served to better the education of our children in many ways, most recently by facilitating a relationship with the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County. Through this relationship, 9th grade World Studies students (led by teacher Chris Mosher) have had the opportunity to teleconference with a Holocaust survivor for the past 4 years. This year, on May 26 and May 28, we continued that tradition by meeting two Holocaust survivors: Werner Reich (pictured below) and Kathy Griesz. Students gathered on Google Meets to hear their testimonies and ask questions about their experience in the Holocaust.

Kathy Griesz was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, and was 13 when Nazi Germany invaded. Along with the rest of the Jewish population of Budapest, she and her family were stripped of their property, money, and belongings (which would never be recovered), and forced into the Budapest Ghetto. In the ghetto, she was subjected to the Nazi’s dehumanization campaign against the Jews and the everpresent fear of being killed for her family’s religious beliefs. Due to the (relative) late occupation of Hungary by the Nazis, Kathy and her immediate family were spared the horrors of the concentration camps, but much of her extended family were not.

Werner Reich was 15 and living in Yugoslavia when he was arrested by the Gestapo after being found hiding with resistance soldiers. Over the next two years, he was transported to multiple concentration camps, before ultimately ending up in Auschwitz. At one point Dr. Mengele, a Nazi doctor, surveyed thousands of young men in the camp; Werner was among 89 that were selected to continue working for the German forces. The rest were sent to their deaths. By the time he was liberated by American forces, he had spent two years of imprisonment under the Nazis, which was followed by two more years of living under Soviet rule in Yugoslavia.

These were Mr. Reich’s parting words to our class:

“Please, be nice to each other. Be helpful to each other. And for those of you who are finding yourself in a very difficult situation, I want to relate to you the story of the two prisoners. Two prisoners were sitting next to each other in a prison yard. One looked through the bars of the prison yard and saw mud and the other one saw stars. Try to focus on the stars.”