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Saturday, April 16, 2005

Pupils learn of Holocaust from survivors

By LYNN BULMAHN
News-Journal Staff writer

NEW SMYRNA BEACH — Bronislaw Honig was born in 1935 in Poland. He was 3 years old when he died during the Nazi Holocaust.

Alfred Kristelher lived only a short time longer. Born in 1937 in Amsterdam, his life ended at the Sobibor death camp in Poland when he was 5.

The two children were among six million people killed during the Nazi Holocaust. Only 12 percent of the Jewish children who were alive in 1933 survived until 1945.

Thanks to a special educational project at New Smyrna Beach Middle School, these young victims will not be forgotten.

Eighth-graders at the school are studying World War II and the Holocaust. As part of their schoolwork, they have set up a special exhibit in the school museum.

They also were hosts of a Thursday afternoon seminar on the war featuring adults who, as young people, witnessed the Nazi occupation first-hand.

Guest speakers included Auschwitz survivors Arthur Fogel; Anni J. Adams, who was sent from Luxembourg to a forced labor camp when she was 16 and Army Air Corps veteran Earl Anderson, who was shot down over France during a bombing mission.

Fogel told the pupils he lied about his age, saying he was 18 instead of 15, in order to be chosen for slave labor. Had the Nazis known his real age, he said, he would have been exterminated at Auschwitz.

"They herded in a few hundred people into a big building, where they were gassed," he said. "They put them in crematoriums and burned their bodies."

Fogel told how he saw flames coming out of the crematorium building.

"That´s where I lost my (younger) sisters," he said. "It was a very, very tragic experience."

Adams said she was forced from her home in Luxembourg when the Nazis invaded. Before returning, her family had to trace its genealogy to the 18th century.

"We had to make sure there was no Jewish blood in any of us," she said.

At age 16, Adams was taken to a forced labor camp. Right before she left, the munitions factory where she would have work was bombed so the Nazis made her work in the fields harvesting carrots and beets. They fed her twice a day -- a thin broth of carrots, beets and oatmeal in water, so disgusting, it was barely edible.

Anderson told of being shot down in France and trying to make his way to freedom.

"If the French people helped you in any way, even to stop and talk, the Germans would shoot them on the spot and capture you," he said. "It was always a great worry that, if you asked (the French) for help, they´d turn you in."

Still, he found refuge. French families hid him in their homes for all but three of the nights he was in enemy territory.

Along with the guests´ oral histories, pupils´ written reports about their victims were displayed.

Sydney Hitchcock, 13, researched Eduard Horneman. She said he died in a human medical experiment when he was her age.

"When we first started studying (the Holocaust), I didn´t know how bad it was," the eighth-grader said.

Jacob Austin-Breneman, 13, said he researched Lia Borak, a fraternal twin. No one knows her exact fate, he said, but she probably also succumbed to Dr. Josef Mengele´s experiments.

"It was really sad but I feel that it´s important to know these things," Jacob said. "They say people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."

The display featured posters and artifacts from the war. One corner depicted Anne Frank´s secret annex, where she and her family hid from the Nazis. As part of the study, students are reading "The Diary of Anne Frank," according to media specialist Dana Thompson.

Those who saw the display and program said they were impressed.

"I think it´s a cool thing to actually have someone who was there," said sixth-grader Brian LeGrand, 12, "It kind of scared me."

Like many of his classmates, Steven Mysnyk, 15, said he´d only known a little bit about the Holocaust before starting the project.

"It´s the worst thing I ever heard," Steven said. "All the stuff (Hitler) has done, it´s really hard to believe."

Gabi O´Grady, 13, agreed.

"I didn´t think (the Holocaust) was that big," the eighth-grader said. "I didn´t know how big an impact it had on everybody."

Their work was a ray of hope to the guest who survived Auschwitz.

"I´m really overwhelmed at the interest of these students in the Holocaust," said Fogel, a retired cantor at Temple Israel in Daytona Beach. "These children, who were raised up in an atmosphere of love and devotion, are learning what it was like for those of us who suffered through it."

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