Jefferson City St. Peter students learn about the Holocaust, as well as stories of mercy and hope
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Not even the children were spared.
About 1.5 million of the 6 million Jewish people who are known to have died in the Holocaust in Germany and other Nazi-occupied nations in the 1930s and ’40s were children.
“There were kindergarten-age children forced to do adult jobs, some with no clothes to wear,” said Adriana Enloe, an eighth-grader at St. Peter Interparish School in Jefferson City.
Adriana and her classmates have been learning about the Holocaust as part of their religion and history classes this year.
The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, refers to the systematic disenfranchisement, deportation and execution of millions of Jewish people by members of the Nazi party in the years leading up to and during World War II.
The St. Peter eighth-graders have been reading a the script of a play based on The Diary of Anne Frank, a girl who spent 761 days with her family and another family in hidden quarters in Amsterdam, Holland.
They were eventually caught and sent to concentration camps, where Anne and most of her family died.
Her diary was eventually found.
Soaring beauty
This year on Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the St. Peter eighth-graders made a promise never to forget.
Their religion teacher, Valerie Jones, told them the story of Terezin, a former German resort town the Nazis turned into a stiflingly overcrowded ghetto for Jewish people.
Many of the people who were sent there kept their sanity by creating art, music, literature and poetry.
They helped the children there create works of great depth and beauty. Copies of the children’s writings were hidden and eventually found and shared after the war.
One little boy wrote a poem about how he once saw a butterfly without realizing that it would be the last one he would ever see.
Inspired by that poem, the Holocaust Museum in Houston commissioned the creation of 1.5 million butterflies in memory of each of the children who died.
The St. Peter students decorated their own paper butterflies and adorned their school hallway with them.
Like visitors to the Yad Vashem international Holocaust memorial in Israel, each eighth-grader at St. Peter was given the name of a person who died in the Holocaust.
That afternoon, students visited the display, watched a Google slide presentation showing the faces of each of the names given to the students.
Then, they shared a moment of silence and a prayer for all who died in the Holocaust and any other genocide.
“They did a lovely job,” said Mrs. Jones. “I’m very proud of them.”
“God is there”
Mrs. Jones noted that as the Holocaust falls farther into the past, people are beginning to forget or to think it never happened.
“But as human beings, we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and bear witness to them so that we never repeat them,” she said.
She noted that the core of Catholic social teaching is the dignity of the human person in all stages of life.
“We want that to jell with the students,” she said, “so that hopefully, they’ll bear witness and speak up and stand up for people.”
It’s been life-changing.
“It made me view the Holocaust differently — how bad it actually was,” said eighth-grader Joey Jones. “I’ll definitely stand up against things like this and try not to let them happen.”
“Our generation needs to know that this really did happen and learn from it,” said Adriana. “I don’t want such a horrible thing to ever happen again.”
Joey said it gives him chills to think of how long Anne Frank and her family spent in hiding, always wondering if they would ever be safe again.
“I can’t imagine what that would be like,” he said.
The students have also read about other children who died in acts of genocide in recent history.
Mrs. Jones said she’s proud of her students’ reactions and level of engagement in these lessons.
She acknowledged that sometimes, words can’t do justice to the reality of human suffering.
“We simply cannot put it all into perspective, but we try,” she said. “And we know that in all of it, God is there. He never leaves us.”
She said the butterfly d0isplay in school is both a reminder of something horrific and a testament to hope.
“We can never forget, but we must never get trapped in a cycle of hate,” she stated.
The students also learned about people who survived the Holocaust and eventually realized that they could not move forward without the hope that comes with offering forgiveness.
Mrs. Jones pointed to one of the last things Anne Frank wrote in her diary: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
“I take great consolation in that,” the teacher stated. “We’re made in God’s image, and God is love. So I have high hopes for us not repeating these sins of the past.”
